Epoch Times - A Tour of Canada’s New National Anti-Communist Memorial | Ludwik Klimkowski
Aired: 2025-05-22
Duration: 06:41


=== Different Communities Mosaic (06:41) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the heart of this nation.
[00:00:01]  You cannot be more central in Canada than this spot because we are downtown.
[00:00:07]  Behind us you can see the buildings of the Parliament.
[00:00:10]  In front of us there's a newly developed second downtown of Ottawa, if you will.
[00:00:15]  It's still in the planning process, but this will be a new home to our major hockey team, Ottawa Senators.
[00:00:24]  We've been recently crushed by the Maple Leafs.
[00:00:27]  Don't even go there.
[00:00:29]  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.
[00:00:41]  This is a Canadian equivalent of American Mall between the Congress of the United States and the Lincoln Memorial.
[00:00:48]  And typically you need a special permission.
[00:00:52]  To get anything built both in Washington and it is the same in Ottawa.
[00:00:57]  So to have this common memory place in the heart of our nation is really, really nice.
[00:01:05]  This is the wall of remembrance and it's divided into two separate parts.
[00:01:10]  This is the front.
[00:01:12]  These two spots are reserved for This is the official interpretation of what this memorial is all about.
[00:01:19]  That interpretation on this side will be in both official languages.
[00:01:22]  And that side is devoted to the largest, the most generous participants in this project.
[00:01:29]  So both organizations as well as individuals who made rather significant donations, both of time and money.
[00:01:37]  In the back, you will see eventually the mosaic of names devoted to The grassroots level, the, you know, kind of...
[00:01:45]  Yeah, the thing that I was involved with.
[00:01:47]  Yeah, Kellogg and Klimkowski and all the others.
[00:02:04]  Why did they come and why their family escaped communism.
[00:02:08]  And I said...
[00:02:10]  I'm the first one with my donation and my story.
[00:02:13]  I want to join 999 others to join me.
[00:02:19]  So this would be a thousand.
[00:02:21]  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.
[00:02:32]  We clearly cannot put every name of every victim from around the globe.
[00:02:37]  So we came to the different communities and we said, listen, here is the idea.
[00:02:43]  Why don't you just tell us what your family story is all about?
[00:02:47]  We ended up with 600 distinctive names that we would know and recognize as those who were engaged in fighting against communism.
[00:02:55]  They were victims of communism.
[00:02:58]  But above all, Jan...
[00:03:00]  This is really devoted to those who found home here.
[00:03:04]  What are these actual names going to look like here?
[00:03:07]  I'm trying to imagine.
[00:03:08]  So they'll be small plaques.
[00:03:10]  And as you can imagine, they need to be, there'll be a large plate to which individual names are basically technically screwed on.
[00:03:20]  They're not placed alphabetically.
[00:03:23]  They are not placed by ethnicity or religion.
[00:03:26]  They represent the true Canadian mosaic.
[00:03:29]  So the idea is that at the end of the wall, there'll be a QR code which you can scan.
[00:03:35]  And you can type in on your phone the name of the individual that you'd like to explore.
[00:03:40]  And then that is a wonderful tool of education and exploration for all of us.
[00:03:47]  I mean, this is so important.
[00:03:50]  This is so important to me.
[00:03:51]  Thank you for making this happen.
[00:03:53]  My pleasure.
[00:03:54]  So why don't you kind of tell me a little bit about what all these...
[00:03:59]  What do things mean, all these tubes?
[00:04:01]  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.
[00:04:12]  Right.
[00:04:12]  This represents the living calendar.
[00:04:15]  And the living calendar, the main theme of this is to come from the darkness of winter, the solstice of winter, which is here.
[00:04:27]  22nd of December, all the way to the sunny day like we're experiencing today.
[00:04:33]  And the analogy is that it's the vast darkness of oppression of communism versus the light.
[00:04:43]  Light is life.
[00:04:44]  Life is in Canada because you're enjoying your prosperity, your freedom and democracy.
[00:04:49]  We're following the dates here.
[00:04:51]  Right.
[00:04:51]  And every single day of the year is at the plateau of this memorial.
[00:04:57]  So, for example, we move to, let's say, April the 30th.
[00:05:02]  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.
[00:05:12]  So the idea, Jan, is that every single community can come and commemorate the importance of their own individual dates.
[00:05:19]  The calendar is vast, right?
[00:05:20]  It's 365 days.
[00:05:22]  So you will see June 4th.
[00:05:25]  It's a special date for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in China.
[00:05:31]  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.
[00:05:50]  So clearly having this long calendar...
[00:05:54]  And the space to really pay attention to your own dates, but also to use this as an educational tool for other communities.
[00:06:03]  That's pretty cool.
[00:06:08]  So you see, this is one of the few hundred mementos that the people on the Wall of Remembrance have received.
[00:06:18]  And if you see the top piece here, it's taken from...
[00:06:23]  The bronze rods that are within this vast memorial.
[00:06:27]  And every single piece is distinct.
[00:06:30]  It is different.
[00:06:32]  It has a different cut.
[00:06:33]  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.