Speaking at the Workmen’s Circle-sponsored annual event on April 18, Goldie Morgentaler – the daughter of famed abortion-rights crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler and Yiddish novelist Chana Rosenfarb – gave an impassioned speech on the difficulty of trying to make sense of what happened in the Holocaust without having experienced it personally.

“As time passes,” Morgentaler said, “it takes with it the personal memory of personal experience. The result is that we who have not lived through this ordeal must, however unwillingly, become its historians.

“To be a child of survivors is to have congress with ghosts – to be overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility… an obligation to never let the dead be forgotten [and] to defend their honour, their names, their humanity [and] their valour.”

Another problem with the passing of time, Morgentaler added, is that eventually all knowledge of the Holocaust will come from fictionalized and romanticized books and movies.

“The Holocaust is everywhere today,” Morgentaler said, mentioning recent movies such as Defiance, The Reader and Inglourious Basterds.

“These movies cash in on a kind of easy emotion that is closer to entertainment than it is to historical reality. They evoke horror and a sentimentalized sense of redemption at the same time, all of it at a comfortable remove from what actually happened.

“I am afraid that as time goes by there will be more and more such fictionalizations… cut off from the reality of what actually happened. No one likes unadulterated, unmitigated horror. No one wants to believe that suffering the Jews experienced during the Holocaust has no purpose, that the dead can never be avenged. We want to be able to sleep at night. We want to feel that something good came out of something bad, even if the good is fiction.”

Much of the memorial program was in Yiddish, with a variety of songs and poems presented. In particular, the poems of Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever, who died this past January at age 96, were featured.

Avra Fainer, whose singing in Yiddish was featured throughout the program, said the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has personal significance to her and her family.

“I’m named after my great uncle Avram, who was a fighter in the Uprising,” Fainer said. “My family memorializes the uprising at our Passover Seder each year, along with participating in the Workmen’s Circle memorial.

“Having heard the [Holocaust] stories from those who experienced them first-hand, I think it’s crucial that I be able to at the very least participate in events such as this to help preserve the memories and keep them alive to the extent I’m able.”

Another important reason to participate, Fainer said, is to preserve the Yiddish language, an overarching theme of the entire memorial.

“I feel like I am able to help preserve what many perceive as a dying language, since a great deal of people who spoke Yiddish died in the Holocaust. By singing in Yiddish, I feel like I’m helping to keep the language alive.”

Morgentaler finished speaking by reciting a poem written by her mother, first in Yiddish, then translated into English.

“So He must come now and prove to me that one can burn, and be burned, and still remain God.”

For more information about The Workmen’s Circle, visit www.toronto-workmens-circle.org.