Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. —Helen Keller
The radio listener was complimenting another citizen who e-mailed Adler on Line in response to a venomous rhetorical attack launched on me by a Halifax radio commentator who told a national TV audience, “Adler would vote for Hitler if he was running as a Conservative.”
When I received that poison dart, my first thoughts went to those in his daily Maritime radio audience who fought the Nazis on the seas and on the beaches. I thought of how painful it must be for them to listen to a talk host trivializing their battles in which they saw so many of their brothers in arms sacrificed.
Being the grandson of those who perished in the Holocaust, I was also thinking of those who were targeted for execution by the Nazi chancellor, and how their children and grandchildren must feel about the rubbish that they were listening to.
With apologies to Canadians of German descent who live in this county, I was not thinking of people like the 42-year-old man from Winnipeg who bared his soul.
“Charles, it’s not easy for me to talk about issues like this. It’s difficult for me because I’m from Germany. In no uncertain ways. I can speak German, I enjoy German foods, and for what it’s worth, people say I look like a German.
“My parents were only five years old when Hamburg was bombed into oblivion! Neither I, nor my parents, could possibly have had anything to do with Hitler or the Nazis, yet we are persecuted every day.
“Charles, please see the world though my eyes as a five-year-old boy whose kindergarten friends in Canada tell me they can’t play with me because their daddy said I was a Nazi. ‘What’s a Nazi?’ I’d ask my dad when I came home crying. ‘Don’t worry, son, you’re not one,’ is all he could say.
“Through my eyes, as I learn in high school about World War II and what happened and who did it and where I’m from and how everyone is looking at me to see my reaction … to see if perhaps they could sense some joy emanating from me at what the Germans did.
“And see the jokes through my eyes, Charles, the jokes my whole life long about how so-and-so better look out around me because they’re Jewish. The jokes about how everybody better look out before I take over.
“I was, as a manager, Little Hitler, and though I’ve lived in Canada for over 40 years, I’m the guy that must still have it in for the Jews.
“Thank you for not playing along with the Halifax hatemonger, for staying true to yourself instead of boarding the bully-train and demolishing the dummy.
“And thank you Charles, for allowing me to share with you my views.
“Peace.”
I was only 10 when my friend Mary told me that I couldn’t come to her birthday party because I was a Jew. When seeking my father’s wisdom, he told me that it was my duty to offer the world nothing but excellence. The only way to fight inhumanity, he felt, was to offer maximum humanity.
Thank you, my fellow Canadian, for opening your heart and my eyes to the reality as it exists for the grandchildren of 1940s Germany. While the old war is behind us, our new battle is with those who, through their promiscuous dispensing of word poison, would diminish the suffering that totalitarianism has inflicted on all people.
Thank you for your decency.
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