May 22, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:41
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Welcome to the heart of this nation. | |
| You cannot be more central in Canada than this spot because we are downtown. | |
| Behind us you can see the buildings of the Parliament. | |
| In front of us there's a newly developed second downtown of Ottawa, if you will. | |
| It's still in the planning process, but this will be a new home to our major hockey team, Ottawa Senators. | |
| We've been recently crushed by the Maple Leafs. | |
| Don't even go there. | |
| And so in terms of foot traffic, in terms of coincidental visitors, it's perfectly placed because it invites you to come and check it out. | |
| This is a Canadian equivalent of American Mall between the Congress of the United States and the Lincoln Memorial. | |
| And typically you need a special permission. | |
| To get anything built both in Washington and it is the same in Ottawa. | |
| So to have this common memory place in the heart of our nation is really, really nice. | |
| This is the wall of remembrance and it's divided into two separate parts. | |
| This is the front. | |
| These two spots are reserved for This is the official interpretation of what this memorial is all about. | |
| That interpretation on this side will be in both official languages. | |
| And that side is devoted to the largest, the most generous participants in this project. | |
| So both organizations as well as individuals who made rather significant donations, both of time and money. | |
| In the back, you will see eventually the mosaic of names devoted to The grassroots level, the, you know, kind of... | |
| Yeah, the thing that I was involved with. | |
| Yeah, Kellogg and Klimkowski and all the others. | |
| Why did they come and why their family escaped communism. | |
| And I said... | |
| I'm the first one with my donation and my story. | |
| I want to join 999 others to join me. | |
| So this would be a thousand. | |
| And a thousand is just a tiny, tiny percentage of 100 million people that were killed by communism since the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. | |
| We clearly cannot put every name of every victim from around the globe. | |
| So we came to the different communities and we said, listen, here is the idea. | |
| Why don't you just tell us what your family story is all about? | |
| We ended up with 600 distinctive names that we would know and recognize as those who were engaged in fighting against communism. | |
| They were victims of communism. | |
| But above all, Jan... | |
| This is really devoted to those who found home here. | |
| What are these actual names going to look like here? | |
| I'm trying to imagine. | |
| So they'll be small plaques. | |
| And as you can imagine, they need to be, there'll be a large plate to which individual names are basically technically screwed on. | |
| They're not placed alphabetically. | |
| They are not placed by ethnicity or religion. | |
| They represent the true Canadian mosaic. | |
| So the idea is that at the end of the wall, there'll be a QR code which you can scan. | |
| And you can type in on your phone the name of the individual that you'd like to explore. | |
| And then that is a wonderful tool of education and exploration for all of us. | |
| I mean, this is so important. | |
| This is so important to me. | |
| Thank you for making this happen. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| So why don't you kind of tell me a little bit about what all these... | |
| What do things mean, all these tubes? | |
| Those bronze rods, and obviously I'm speaking on behalf of the artist who won the competition because he verbalized this in the best way. | |
| Right. | |
| This represents the living calendar. | |
| And the living calendar, the main theme of this is to come from the darkness of winter, the solstice of winter, which is here. | |
| 22nd of December, all the way to the sunny day like we're experiencing today. | |
| And the analogy is that it's the vast darkness of oppression of communism versus the light. | |
| Light is life. | |
| Life is in Canada because you're enjoying your prosperity, your freedom and democracy. | |
| We're following the dates here. | |
| Right. | |
| And every single day of the year is at the plateau of this memorial. | |
| So, for example, we move to, let's say, April the 30th. | |
| April the 30th for the Vietnamese community in Canada and globally is the day of the fall of Saigon, where life of Vietnamese people has changed. | |
| So the idea, Jan, is that every single community can come and commemorate the importance of their own individual dates. | |
| The calendar is vast, right? | |
| It's 365 days. | |
| So you will see June 4th. | |
| It's a special date for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in China. | |
| But it's also the day of freedom of the Solidarity people because the June 4th of 1989, same day, led to the new elections, semi-democratic elections that arguably led to the fall of communism in Europe later in November of the same year. | |
| So clearly having this long calendar... | |
| And the space to really pay attention to your own dates, but also to use this as an educational tool for other communities. | |
| That's pretty cool. | |
| So you see, this is one of the few hundred mementos that the people on the Wall of Remembrance have received. | |
| And if you see the top piece here, it's taken from... | |
| The bronze rods that are within this vast memorial. | |
| And every single piece is distinct. | |
| It is different. | |
| It has a different cut. | |
| It's almost like being at the Berlin Wall in 1989 and chiseling your own piece and just keep it for the next generations to cherish. |
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