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Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti
commemorates
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Location: Markham Civic Centre
101 Town Centre Blvd. map
"Eighty-eight-year-old survivor shares childhood memories in recently published memoir"
During a Markham council meeting on January 24 at 7 p.m., the Town of Markham will commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day with an official proclamation by the Mayor of Markham, Frank Scarpitti and 12 Markham councillors in recognition of the day.
On January 27th, people across the globe and here in Canada will mark the United Nations–declared international day of commemoration to honour the victims of the Holocaust. This year’s theme focuses on children and the Holocaust, in honour of the one-and-a-half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, together with the thousands of Roma and Sinti children, the disabled and others who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The theme has special significance for eighty-eight-year-old Canadian Betty Rich.
It has taken 57 years for the world to read Toronto resident Betty Rich’s memoir for the first time. A young girl during the war, her story was too painful to tell because of her loss of so many loved-ones. Her book, Little Girl Lost, tells about 16-year-old Rich’s escape from the Nazis into the Soviet Union and, later, her harrowing flight from the Communist regime in Poland, an account that took her more than 10 years to write.
The United Nations designated the international day of commemoration in 2005 to coincide with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. The week following will include a series of events such as memorial and educational activities aimed at instilling the memory of the tragedy in younger generations to prevent genocide from occurring again.
Betty Rich’s parents and four siblings died in Poland during the war. Only her sister and a much-older brother, who had moved to Israel before 1939, survived. To this day, she doesn’t know exactly how her parents and siblings perished in the Holocaust.
“Many of the of the Azrieli Series authors were among the few European Jewish children to survive the Nazi genocide,” said Dr. Naomi Azrieli, Chair and Executive Director of the Azrieli Foundation. “In a year when the UN is focusing on children in the Holocaust, we are honoured to present a new book, Little Girl Lost, that gives us some insight into what it was like for a young girl to come of age in exile during wartime.”
Rich’s memoir was published as one of two new volumes in the Azrieli Foundation’s Fourth Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs this past summer.
The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program was established by the Azrieli Foundation in 2005 to collect, preserve and share the memoirs and diaries written by survivors of the twentieth-century Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe who later made their way to Canada. The program is guided by the conviction that each survivor of the Holocaust has a remarkable story to tell, and that such stories play an important role in education about tolerance and diversity. For more information visit
www.azrielifoundation.org
or call 416-484-1132 ext. 8.
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