Avi Benlolo: No sympathy for the Nazi

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Despite the public outcry over Canada’s honouring of a former Nazi in our parliament, Post columnist Colby Cosh drew consternation from the Jewish community this week. He argued Wednesday that it “seems possible (to me) to have sympathy for the young Hunka’s decision” to join a Ukrainian SS unit.

“Sympathy” you say, for Yaroslav Hunka’s service in the Waffen-SS Galicia unit? You mean the same unit that was allegedly involved in mass murder of Jews, Poles and even Ukrainians during the Second World War? A University of Ottawa political scientist who specializes in Ukraine explained the unit to CTV: “They massacred entire villages of Polish residents in this region… including women and children because they were accused of being associated with Soviet partisans.”

Cosh appeared to justify his sentiment because after the war, “a conscious decision was made not to treat them as if they were German members of the SS or other ideological collaborators”. That Canadian government decision was made to justify the allowance of so many Nazi war criminals admitted either erroneously or by turning a blind eye to their heinous crimes. But that decision was obviously wrong and insulting to victims of the Holocaust and to many others who were murdered by SS units like Hunka’s Waffen-SS.

Once “sympathy” or excuses are made for those who sided with mass murderers and with pure evil, the lines between right and wrong get blurred. Indeed, that is the very problem in our society today when the virtues of right and wrong are questioned and everything we know, even the truth, is deconstructed.

Despite the fact after possibly being involved in mass murder with his unit and then sneaking into this country under false pretense, Cosh expects us to feel sorry for the 98-year-old Hunka: “what I see is an old man who was cruelly let down at the end of his days by naive descendants and a halfwit glory-seeking politician. If he does deserve to suffer, well, suffering is what he’ll get”.

Sympathy and suffering? What about the millions of victims of Nazism? Did they not suffer for real? Did they not pay the ultimate price because of hatred and bigotry? Did they have a chance to flee the so-called bloodlands to the greener pastures of Canada?

Following the war, Canada shamefully admitted thousands of Nazi war criminals to live out their remaining days free and clear. While we let these monsters in, we sent back Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis to the gas chambers in Germany.

Hunka and any elderly Nazi still alive deserves no sympathy. They deserve to face justice. They deserve to be stripped of citizenship, denaturalized, and immediately removed from this country. His extradition request by Poland should make it easier on the Canadian justice system which has shown little appetite over these years to prosecute and extradite Nazi war criminals.

Our Parliament’s honouring of Hunka as a war hero was embarrassing enough. The resignation of the Speaker and the Prime Minister’s apology are insignificant and purely a distraction compared to the incredible learning opportunity this debacle provides all Canadians.

For the first time, all of Canada saw, noticed and learned about the real-live Nazis who live within our midst. Several years ago, along with my friend Max Eisen, together we led a delegation of Holocaust survivors to Ottawa to appeal to the government to unseal the Deschenes Commission files to allow greater public scrutiny about the Nazis who live among us.

We pushed for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals like Helmut Oberlander who was a member of the Einsatzgruppen death squads, serving as an interpreter.

Under pressure mainly from the Ukrainian community, successive Canadian governments were biding their time. Nature would take its course as Nazi war criminals would pass away, burying this nation’s dirty little secret with them. The hiding away of our Nazis has become such an ethos in our nation that our government, in a moment of shame, even wanted to delete the Hansard evidence of the debacle in parliament.

There is no feeling sorry or sympathizing with Hunka or any other person who participated in the Nazi war machine, directly or indirectly. This episode was our country’s moment of truth about our horrible Nazi cover-up.

National Post

Avi Benlolo is the founder and chairman of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.