Many Canadians, including those with Jewish ancestry or connections, observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th. It commemorates the lives and heroism of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945. While the majority of the Holocaust victims were Jews, many minority groups were targeted as well.

The Nazis persecuted those they considered to be racially inferior. While Nazis viewed Jews as racial enemies and subjected them to arbitrary arrest, internment, and murder, their racial ideology also targeted the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses and Black people. The Nazis aimed to eradicate anyone they saw as a threat to the survival of the German people.

No city, town or village was too small to escape the diabolical schemes of the Nazis who annihilated over 6 million Jews. Over 20,000 communities were destroyed in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

In the Concentration Camps, the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David. They also forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’). Hitler saw gay men as a threat to his campaign to purify Germany, because their partnerships could not bear children to grow the Aryan race he aimed to cultivate. However, the treatment of homosexual inmates in Nazi concentration camps is a subject largely ignored by historians in both West and East Germany after the second world war.

Not until the 1980s, when research began to focus on lesser-known victims of Nazi terror and atrocities, did attention shift to the fate of homosexuals. The Buchenwald Memorial is the site of the persecution and death of considerable numbers of prisoners identified by the pink triangle on their clothing. There they were subjected to the harshest conditions and treated as the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy. Incarceration in concentration camps like Buchenwald marked a stage in the radicalization of Nazi policy against homosexuals. The pink triangle is still used today by gay communities as a reminder of the past and a pledge that history will not repeat itself.

In current times, many Canadian Jews are children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as well as friends, neighbours, and colleagues. Under the Holocaust's looming shadow, traumatic experiences from these events affected future generations; to this day we must be honest about how our communities are influenced by these past events, and how the Holocaust shaped society.

In light of rising anti-semitism around the world, we must also be clear when discussing anti-Semitic incidents and sentiments, confront those who deny the Holocaust happened, and most importantly continue to apply the lessons learned from this awful time in history to combat bigotry and prejudice in all its forms.

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