By Jonathon Van Maren It was grey and chilly when I finally found the Judenplatz, a small cobblestoned square surrounded by cafes with the Jewish museum looming on one side. In the centre of the square, a memorial of steel and concrete rose out of the cobblestones to the height of nearly four metres, a…
By Jonathon Van Maren On June 29, 2017, Dr. Ellen Wiebe and a nurse slipped into the Louis Brier Home and Hospital, an Orthodox Jewish nursing home in Vancouver. The nursing home forbids the killing of patients, and so Dr. Wiebe, a renowned abortionist who also dabbles in assisted suicide, had to hide her lethal…
By Jonathon Van Maren Several weeks ago, I was speaking to a friend who works for a Jewish publication, about the slow but inexorable passing of the World War II generation, and how day by day, week by week, memory is slipping into history. He works with several organizations that collect and preserve the testimonies…
By Jonathon Van Maren After surviving six Nazi concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, it is a miracle that Pinchas Gutter has lived to become 86 years old. Born in 1932 in Lodz, Poland, just a few years before the Reich that would murder millions of his people sent their servants tromping across the border…
By Jonathon Van Maren On May 17, 1934, a beautiful little girl was born to Jewish parents in Berlin. Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, both talented professional singers, called her Hessy, and they were tremendously proud of her—despite the fact that Jewish babies were not particularly welcome in Germany at the time. A year later, the…
By Jonathon Van Maren On March 27, CNN reported that an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor named Mireille Knoll was stabbed to death in her Paris apartment, which was then set on fire—officials believe the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism. As a ten-year-old girl, Knoll evaded the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in 1942 that resulted in the Nazi-directed…
By Jonathon Van Maren Gavin McInnes is not a Holocaust-denier, and he is not a neo-Nazi. It’s necessary to make clarifying statements like that due to a video released a couple of days ago, which rapidly attracted the attention and approval of alt-right neo-Nazis such as David Duke and Richard Spencer, which resulted in McInnes…
Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter joins Jonathon Van Maren to tell his story. Pinchas lived through the Warsaw Ghetto, witnessed the Warsaw Uprising, and survived five concentration camps.
By Jonathon Van Maren This week marks the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the sprawling Nazi death camp tucked into the Polish countryside near a nondescript village called Oświęcim. The very name now carries with it a weighty darkness, as if the millions of souls sent off in excruciating horror to eternity somehow…
Jonathon Van Maren speaks with with Lord George Weidenfeld of the British House of Lords, and Steve Maman of the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq. Lord Weidenfeld, a Holocaust survivor, shares how a conversation with Pope John Paul II and a long-standing debt of gratitude to Christians spurred him to act. Steve…