Today marks Yom ha-Shoah, the solemn commemoration of the brutal murder and discrimination endured by the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Almost every Jewish person out there has a story of a family member who endured the Holocaust, including myself.

There’s a park that borders my riding dedicated to a well-known Holocaust survivor, Felix Opatowski. At 15, Felix risked his life and smuggled goods out of Nazi ghettos in exchange for food for his family. After being deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1943, he joined the Polish underground as a runner and later helped plan an attempt to demolish the camp’s crematorium.

Not long ago, I attended the premiere for the Legacy Portrait Project documentary, where Holocaust survivors spoke of their experiences with their grandchildren. These conversations filmed in the documentary capture a moment in time, a glimpse into the individual triumph of each survivor, having prevailed over adversity by building families and finding love and joy after the Holocaust.

One in three students in Canada believe the Holocaust was fabricated or exaggerated, and 42% of students have explicitly seen an anti-Semitic incident in their school.

I’m looking forward to September of this year, when the new Holocaust curriculum will be officially launched in schools all over this province. Learning and listening to these stories of the Holocaust is crucial because those who fail—