History of a Holocaust Survivor Turned Eighty

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

July 19, my 80^th birthday -- a milestone, yes, but for me, an even bigger one was just being born. My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I found out just a few months ago that, technically, so am I. My parents were from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born in 1945. By 1943 most Jews in the city, including their own families, had been murdered by the Nazis, at Treblinka, and after the uprising in the Jewish ghetto, my parents, by now married, became slave labour in a major Nazi munitions plant, the HASAG-Pelcery concentration camp, in the city.

The Russian army liberated Czestochowa January 16-17, 1945, and I was born July 19, six months later. You can do the math. My mother was emaciated and didn’t even know she was pregnant, but another month, and it would have been obvious, and she would have been killed. (I never asked how this happened but found out when listening to her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995. The men and women were housed in different barracks, but one night the Germans were delousing one of the buildings and allowed married couples to sleep together in the other.)

In 1945 the 9^th of Av fell on July 19, and the Jewish world had just gone through our worst period in history. I was born in a makeshift hospital at the Jasna Gora, the famed Pauline Catholic monastery in the city. The actual city hospital had been destroyed in the fighting. It is home to the Matka Boska Czestochowska, (“the mother of God”), a very beautiful and large icon of Mary and the baby Jesus. Other women giving birth were surprised and one said, “Ona jest Zydowka.” (She’s a Jew.) So, though I am a proud Polish Jew, this could only have helped! The doctor who delivered whispered to my mother that he was Jewish but added that he wanted it kept quiet because he wasn’t going to leave Poland. It also took awhile for a mohel to come to the city for me.

The next few years were spent in Pocking-Waldstadt, a DP camp in the American zone in Bavaria, Germany, and then on to Pier 21 in Halifax and Canada. We lived in Montreal, though at home we were to all intents and purposes in Czestochowa, Jewish Poland.

As I was packing up my books in May because we all had to vacate our offices for the summer due to repairs in our building, I came across a book that I had never read – I don’t even recall where I got it -- by the Polish historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records 1944-1947 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Chapter 5 is comprised of “Lists of Jewish Children Who Survived,” in alphabetical order. I am listed on p. 146 (Heniek Srebrnik, 1945). I sent in a form to the Claims Conference in New York informing them. So, at age 80, I’ve become a Holocaust survivor! Compared to that start, the next decades have been easy street! As the Aussies say, “no worries! But the Jewish world has grown darker. Like many others, were I to write a memoir, I’d call it From Hitler to Hamas.

I grew up in Montreal, and have lived in Calgary and Charlottetown, as well as London, England, and four American cities. But I’ve only been to Winnipeg twice, in 1982 and, more dramatically, the weekend of Sept. 7-10, 2001. I presented a paper on “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” to a conference on “Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905-1960,” organized by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. I left the morning of Sept. 11. An hour into the flight to Toronto we were told all airplanes had to land at the nearest major airport. I spent the next three days in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with fellow passengers. We mostly watched the television reporting on the 9/11 catastrophe.

Though an academic, I have always written for newspapers, including Jewish ones, in Canada and the United States. Some, like the Jewish Free Press of Calgary, the Jewish Tribune of Toronto, and the previous version of the Canadian Jewish News, no longer exist, which is a shame. Fortunately, the Jewish Post still does.

 

Democracy is in Danger in East Africa

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Three countries in east Africa have seen their governments engaged in measures that threaten democracy. Power has remained highly centralised in the executive, enabled by legislatures which repeatedly submit to the president.

In Kenya, President William Ruto may even be laying the ground to extend his time in power beyond 2027. Moses Kuria, one of his top advisors, in June argued that legal challenges facing the reconstitution of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) could make it impossible to hold a credible election until 2032.

Meanwhile, the country has witnessed an increasing crackdown on protests, including the killing of more than 40 people so far this summer in nationwide demonstrations against Ruto’s government. Hundreds of others have been injured or arrested, and thousands of businesses looted and destroyed in nationwide protests.

Kenya’s interior minister Kipchumba Murkomen called it “an attempted coup” by “criminal anarchists.” However, the Law Society of Kenya condemned the police for their handling of the protests and viewed it as part of a recent wave of repression. It was part of the government’s latest strategy to crush dissent over moves to increase taxes amidst a cost-of-living crisis.

Kidnappings and abductions of protesters spiked after the demonstrations, and activist groups alleged that some people remain unaccounted for, despite Ruto’s assertion to the contrary. In the absence of political challengers, protesters and youth activists have become the country’s unofficial political opposition.

Kenya has effectively became a state increasingly known for kleptocracy, corruption and abuse.

In neighbouring Tanzania, the main opposition party has been barred from participating in this year’s coming election, after its leader was charged with treason in April. It followed a rally in southern Tanzania at which Tundu Lissu called for electoral reforms. It was part of his nationwide campaign under the slogan “No Reforms, No Election.”

Ramadhani Kailima, director of elections at the Independent National Elections Commission, said that Lissu’s political party, Chadema, had failed to sign a code of conduct document, resulting in its disqualification from the upcoming October’s elections.

Lissu was expected to challenge incumbent President Samia Suluhu Hassan of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party, which, together with two predecessors, has governed Tanzania since independence in 1961.

When Hassan, a native of the island of Zanzibar, first came to power in 2021, after the death of President John Magufuli, she was praised for reversing some of his more authoritarian tendencies. Campaigners and opposition parties have since accused her government of an intensifying crackdown on political opponents, citing arrests and abductions of opposition members.

Lissu said that the make-up of the electoral commission needed to change and should not include people directly appointed by Hassan. His lawyer, Rugemeleza Nshala, told Reuters that the charges against him were politically motivated, adding: “You cannot separate these charges from politics.” Lissu risks being sentenced to death if convicted.

The opposition leader has been arrested on numerous occasions and in 2017 survived an assassination attempt in which his vehicle was shot at 16 times. He then went into exile, returning briefly in 2020 to run against Magufuli in that year’s election. He left after the results were announced, complaining about supposed irregularities. He returned in 2023, following changes introduced by Hassan which her government said were aimed at allowing greater opposition freedom.

But Lissu is not alone in the region in facing reprisals for political action. In neighbouring Uganda, opposition leader Kizza Besigye is facing the same charges, based on the same pretext that organising resistance against entrenched political power amounts to treason.

As well, 36 members of his opposition party Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) were arrested in July 2024. The group had traveled to the Kenyan city of Kisumu for a training course, but were deported back to Uganda where authorities charged them with terrorism-related offenses.

The suspects were accused of being “engaged in covert activities that are suspected to be subversive.” The group denied any wrongdoing, criticizing the actions of the Ugandan authorities.

“This is an absurd abuse of a judicial process to witch-hunt and torment opposition supporters,” their lawyer Erias Lukwago contended, claiming that the FDC members had travelled to Kisumu to attend a training seminar.

Opposition critics and human rights campaigners have long accused Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government of using fabricated charges to clamp down on his opponents, including Besigye, who has run against him in four presidential elections. He rejected each result, alleging fraud and voter intimidation.

Under Museveni, who has ruled the country for almost 40 years and will seek re-election early next year, Uganda has descended into a repressive state with a long history of intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of those who are critical of the government. 

Martha Karua, one of Kenya’s most respected human rights lawyers, believes that democracy is under threat in all three east African states. “We are staring at a regional crisis -- not at an economic crisis, not a crisis of trade, but of democracy itself.” There has been little concern about this internationally, she stated.

“The onus is on the legislators of east Africa to find their teeth,” maintains Nanjala Nyabola, a Nairobi-based political analyst. “Their job is to defend the people who elected them” and “rein in the excesses of the executive.”

Brazil’s Unsteady Democracy

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is on trial in the country’s Supreme Court, accused of masterminding a plot to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential elections to leftist candidate Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

It marks the first time in Brazilian history that a former head of state is being tried for attempting to overthrow the government. His supporters also stormed Brazil’s Congress building and Presidential offices in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023.

Federal police earlier this year released two reports that detailed the accusations, including that he personally edited a decree for a national state of emergency designed to prevent the election’s winner from taking office. He abandoned the plan after leaders of Brazil’s military refused to take part. If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison. 

Bolsonaro has already been barred from running for office until 2030, but he retains continued political influence and popularity. He is hoping that Congress will overturn his election ban. He called the ruling “a rape of democracy” and said he was trying to find a way to run in next year’s presidential election.

Two Supreme Court justices he nominated will lead the electoral court before the election. Those judges have told him, he has said, “that my ineligibility is absurd.” In March, thousands of his followers rallied at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach to protest the charges. Other supporters came together at a public demonstration in Sao Paulo in late June as well, to oppose his ongoing trial.

Meanwhile, the election’s victor, President “Lula,” as he is known, doesn’t feel Bolsonaro’s arrest has proved that Brazil’s future as a democracy is assured. In an interview with Jon Lee Anderson, published in the New Yorker magazine May 8, he feared that “the entire post-Second World War order, created largely through the intervention of the United States, seemed on the verge of collapse.”

Part of the problem is economic. “Democracy starts to fall when it no longer meets the people’s interests. Since 1980, the working people in countries that built welfare states have only lost, while income concentration has increased. So what response can we give to Brazilian society?”

This is not only a Brazilian issue. “Last year, the world spent $2.4 trillion on weapons, while seven hundred and thirty million people go to sleep every night not knowing if they’ll have breakfast when they wake up,” he said. “That should be humanity’s main concern.”

In November, Brazil will host the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, in the city of Belém, a location, at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, chosen to bring attention to the crisis of deforestation. Yet it is hard to imagine that it will bring radical change.

The Amazon is now close to a tipping point beyond which it may not generate enough rainfall to sustain its own ecosystem, as well as agriculture, hydropower, water supply, and industries that have fueled Brazil’s growth.

Lula has himself lost popularity. Last month Brazil’s Congress nullified a presidential decree for the first time in decades, rejecting a move by Lula’s government to hike a financial transactions tax. Lula’s allies had only 98 votes against 383 in the lower house to keep the tax increase on some transactions, including foreign exchange and credit cards. The Senate also defeated the move. It was the first time lawmakers overturned a presidential decree in Brazil since 1992, in a rebuke of Lula one year ahead of the country’s next presidential election campaign, and it signaled flagging support for his left-of-center administration.

Thomas Traumann, an independent political consultant, said the decision by lawmakers indicates Lula does “not have a stable majority in Congress. If this was a parliamentary system, it would have been the end of this government,” he asserted.

Recent polls show Lula losing to most potential candidates in next year’s election. Assuming Bolsonaro remains ineligible, the most likely winner would be the current governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas, who served as the minister of infrastructure for Bolsonaro.

He defeated Fernando Haddad, a professor of political science who is a member of Lula’s Workers’ Party and the current finance minister, for governor of the state. Haddad also lost the 2018 presidential election to Bolsonaro. This doesn’t auger well for him, should he replace Lula as the party’s candidate.