Proposed Holocaust gallery sparks battle in Ottawa (02/08/98)

Proposed Holocaust gallery sparks battle in Ottawa

by Christopher Guly

OTTAWA - Plans to establish a Holocaust memorial at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has met strong opposition from veterans' groups and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. As head of UCCLA and president of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 360 in Toronto, retired lawyer John Gregorovich represented both interests when he appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Veterans' Affairs in Ottawa on February 4.

The five senators who sit on the panel heard from those who support the creation of a Holocaust gallery at the museum and those who don't.

The legion argument, which Mr. Gregorovich reinforced, is simple: a Holocaust memorial has no place in a museum dedicated to Canada's military history. UCCLA's position also is straightforward. Their argument against the gallery is partly based on semantics.

"We feel that it's important to have a museum dealing with all the genocide that occurred during the second world war," Mr. Gregorovich told The Weekly. "Ideally, we think it should be called a 'genocide gallery.'" Perhaps, such a memorial could highlight all atrocities committed against people throughout recorded history and be better housed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which runs the war museum and is situated across the river from Ottawa in Hull, Quebec, Mr. Gregorovich said.

The UCCLA has also taken issue with war museum officials who failed to respond to the association's request for input into the proposed Holocaust memorial. Mr. Gregorovich said he sent the museum a letter in January 1997 and never received a reply.

"They chose to work with [the Jewish] community and did no further consultation with other groups," he said. While Mr. Gregorovich says he's not against memorializing the estimated 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II, he says it's wrong to single out one group under the banner of a "holocaust" when 44 million people died during the war. His brother, Andrew, editor of the journal Forum, says 14.5 million of those were Ukrainians.

"We should emphasize the fact that many other people died," said John Gregorovich. "It's quite appropriate to remember that Jewish losses were part of it. But if we're going to be fair, we have to do a fair reading of what happened during the war."

"The director of the war museum, Vic Suthren, said the objective of the Nazis was the killing of Jews. It shows the man is not very well versed in history. The chief objective of the Nazis was the destruction of Slavs," added the UCCLA chairman.

Regardless of which victims had precedence on the Nazis' brutal hit list, the controversy surrounding whether to have and, if so, where to locate a Holocaust gallery likely won't help the increasingly cool relationship between the organized Ukrainian and Jewish communities in Canada.

The UCCLA and the Ukrainian Orthodox lay organization, the Alberta Ukrainian Self-Reliance League, have both been critical of the federal government's appointment of Neal Sher, a former director of the U.S. Office of Special Investigations (OSI) who in December 1997 was appointed advisor to Canada's war crimes unit.

Eugene Harasymiw, president of the Self-Reliance League, has compared Mr. Sher to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy who blacklisted suspected Communists. He told The Ottawa Citizen recently that Mr. Sher and his former employer are "corrupters, and not facilitators, of justice."

Mr. Sher was in charge of the U.S. hunt for Nazis from 1983 to 1994. Few Ukrainian groups will forget that it was under Mr. Sher's leadership of the OSI that John Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 under charges that he was the vicious Treblinka death camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." Though the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted Mr. Demjanjuk and a U.S. appeals court lambasted the OSI for its "reckless disregard for the truth," the Ukrainian community in both the United States and Canada has not forgotten Mr. Sher's role in the debacle.

On the other side, groups like the Canadian Jewish Congress credit Mr. Sher, who happens to be a Jew, as the man most likely to push forward the federal government's agenda of deporting suspected war criminals - rather than trying them on the charges via criminal proceedings as the Ukrainian Canadian community prefers.

In the meantime, the question of building a home to recall the victims of the Nazis or other evil regimes through time remains in limbo. The whole thing has led to a war of sorts, with some alliances being drawn from surprising quarters.

Sen. Orville Phillips, who chairs the Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee and served as a bomber with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, has already gone on record to say he would prefer to see the financially troubled war museum first get more money before any serious discussions are held about a Holocaust museum.

As the senator told The Ottawa Citizen recently, "The history of the war is being revised and interpreted under today's attitude rather than the attitude at that time."

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