‘He wanted to save them all’: How Canadian soldiers liberated Europe + met the Holocaust Liberation75

In the fall of 1944, a young Canadian soldier from Montreal liberated Kamp Vught, a Dutch concentration camp. He discovered rooms full of confiscated Jewish religious artifacts. These had been left behind when the Jewish prisoners were sent to death camps in Poland. Private Jacob Marcovitch asked his superior officer if he could take the prayer shawls and prayer books with him, when the regiment pushed on elsewhere to fight the Nazis. “He wanted to save them all,” the man’s son told Ellin Bessner for her new book “Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military and WWII”. For Liberation75, now on a revised date due to COVID-19, Ellin will share stories in the virtual conference of how Canada’s fighting men in uniform acted with great compassion on their sacred mission as liberators of Europe, and their efforts in the face of the horrors of the Final Solution. With the participation of Bob Delson, son of an RCAF photographer at Bergen-Belsen.