Odette School of Business professor Dr. Kyle Brykman holds a photo of his grandparents Mary and Sam Hoppe, cradling him as a young boy — a reminder of the generations shaped by Holocaust survival and the responsibility of remembrance. (SUBMITTED BY KYLE BRYKMAN/University of Windsor)
By Victor Romao
For Odette School of Business professor Dr. Kyle Brykman, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is about remembrance and responsibility.
Observed annually on Jan. 27—the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp—International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the six million Jews whose lives were lost and promotes education and global action against hatred, intolerance and antisemitism.
Brykman, the grandson of four Holocaust survivors, reflects on stories of survival and profound loss from his relatives, including those of his grandmother, Mary Hoppe. She endured and witnessed atrocities in forced labour and concentration camps before eventually settling in Toronto after the war.
For him, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also about responsibility—the responsibility to preserve historical truth at a time when denial and distortion persist.
“One of the greatest dangers,” he says, “is the casual dilution of Holocaust language. When people use the term loosely, it removes the gravity of what actually happened. My entire extended family was wiped out.”
Brykman says the Holocaust did not begin with camps and crematoria but with rhetoric that escalated into laws, restrictions and violence. “It started with words, and people ignoring what those words meant.”
Brykman’s grandmother, Mary Hoppe, was born in 1926 in Łódź, Poland, one of Europe’s largest Jewish centres before the Second World War. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, attending school and enjoying her childhood.
That normalcy collapsed on Sept. 7, 1939, when the German army arrived.
Jews were pushed out of public life, stripped of security and marked for isolation.
Brykman said his grandmother recalled how quickly neighbours disappeared. Her family fled under harsh winter conditions, hauling what little they could carry behind a horse and buggy.
After fleeing to Warsaw, his grandmother disguised herself as a non-Jew to return to Łódź and retrieve her mother, travelling by train without identification. The world narrowed quickly after that: ghettos, labour camps, exhaustion and constant terror.
At 16, she scrubbed toilets and washed laundry to remain useful enough to be kept alive. In forced labour camps, she worked 12-hour shifts producing ammunition for the German war effort. Hunger was relentless. Disease was unforgiving.
She was eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen, where prisoners were stripped of their belongings, identities, and dignity and faced constant fear of death. They were forced to undress, believing they were being sent to the gas chambers, and the brief relief when water fell from the showers was overwhelming but fleeting. She survived further transports, illness and death marches before liberation in 1945.
She eventually rebuilt her life in Toronto, always mindful of the luck that kept her alive while many of her relatives did not survive. Today, her story is preserved and shared by those born long after the camps were freed, including her grandson.
Brykman has visited concentration camps through the March of the Living, an experience he describes as transformative. Walking through those sites, he says, “removes any illusion that history is distant or theoretical.”
“History repeats itself when people are blind to what happened, when they simply believe what they want to believe—about the Holocaust, about antisemitism—and when they stay silent. If you see something wrong and say nothing, that’s how it starts,” Brykman says.
Education, he adds, is essential to breaking that cycle.
“It is most powerful when it confronts denial directly—especially Holocaust denial, antisemitism and other forms of identity-based hate,” he says. “The murder of six million Jews was systematic, intentional, and barbaric and there is no historical comparison. It erased a staggering portion of the global Jewish population, a loss from which we have yet to recover.”