This is a transcript of the video Monument recalls tragedy of Jewish refugees.
[MUSIC PLAYING](Text on screen: The Canadian Press.)
[APPLAUSE](Daniel Libeskind appears on camera. Daniel is wearing a black cardigant.)
Because I’m a child of a Holocaust survivor, because I’m an immigrant, because I lived under an oppressive totalitarian regime, this monument, this sculpture, means a lot to me. Because it tells a story of a tragedy, a dark period in Canadian history where antisemitism and anti-immigration policies led to the murder of hundreds of people and the suffering of hundreds of others. So I wanted to tell that story through activating the process of, what is the story about?
It’s not only about the irretrievable past– we can’t bring those people back to life– but to tell the story of how hatred, racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, how that mechanism, the anonymity of that process, leads to disaster. So we all have a responsibility to understand what that story of MS St. Louis really was. And of course there are also the names inscribed of those who perished.
But also to think about the future– to think of how that story has an impact today. Because we have immigration. But unfortunately, we still have xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism in our society.
This is an effort to learn from mistakes of the past and wrongs from the past, and to reassert our current values of tolerance, inclusivity, and understanding.
It’s an abstract piece. You’re in front of the machine. It’s not a virtual reality. It’s a real set of gears, just like the gears that were driving the ship. But it also represents the gears of conscience, the gears of bureaucracy, the fact that you’re not in a static universe, that things lead to other things, that there’s a translation from hatred, the small, fast-rotating gear, to the slower gear of racism, to the even slower one of xenophobia, and then finally the large but slow gear of antisemitism, how all these interlinked gears really register as a process, and the fact that we can never let the machinery of bureaucracy or of oblivion or of anonymity drive our lives. We have to take real participation– emotional, intellectual, civic participation– in issues that affect people’s lives.
The Canadian Press.
[MUSIC PLAYING]Reviewed October 16, 2011