Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shed tears during an emotional visit on Sunday to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany.
Trudeau decided to visit Auschwitz after his participation in the NATO summit held this week in Warsaw. After his tour of the camps Trudeau was joined by a number of Holocaust survivors including Nate Leipciger who, after World War II, immigrated to Canada at the age of 18.
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The prime minister was also accompanied by Canadian Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion and Rabbi Adam Scheier, Vice President of the Rabbinical Council of Canada.
During the tour, Trudeau visited the section of the camp’s museum dubbed the ‘Canada Warehouse, ’ an area in which property plundered by the Nazis from the victims was assembled. The prisoners gave this area the name because to them the Canada represented wealth.
While viewing the piles of shoes, bags, glasses and brushes which were stolen from the Jews upon arrival at the camps, the prime minister could not hold back his tears. Shortly after he visited the crematoria and the gas chambers in Auschwitz 1, he then made his way to Birkenau before embarking on a march on the train tracks to the ramp on which the Nazis carried out their selection process of fresh arrivals of Jewish victims.
Trudeau also bore witness to the ruins of the gas chambers in Crematorium 3 where the Jewish delegation accompanying him cited the memorial prayer, Kaddish.
“Today we saw the possibilities of deliberate human cruelty and evil. Let us remember always this painful truth about ourselves. Never enough tolerance. Humanity must learn to love its diversity, ” Trudeau wrote in the guest book of the museum.
Canada is among the 36 countries that supported the Perpetual Fund of Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, which finances the maintenance of authentic remains of the concentration camp.
At the end of the tour, Trudeau wrote on his Twitter account, “I was deeply moved to visit the (Auschwitz Museum). May our witness to humanity’s capacity for evil strengthen our vow to say: Never again.”
