‘When they fight, I fight’: Holocaust survivor unfazed by neo-Nazi posters

Several neo-Nazi posters were discovered at a New Westminster bus stop Saturday morning.

The literature was spotted around 6th Street and 4th Avenue and featured the web address of a site that calls themselves the online headquarters for “Global Fascist Fraternity” and bears the slogan “Gas the k****, race war now, 1488 boots on the ground!”

Two different posters were noticed, one saying “The key for a new Canada” with the image of a swastika and the other depicting Nazi soldiers confronting men with machine guns bearing the resemblance of Islamic State fighters, saying “It’s always going to be us vs. them. Join us before they stomp you.”

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Chaim Kornfeld, a 91-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor, told Global News these kinds of posters don’t surprise him, even in 2017.

Kornfeld was born in Hungary and on March 4, 1944, at age 17, he was transported from a Jewish ghetto to a concentration camp. He was later shipped to Auschwitz, then Mauthausen-Gusen, where he and thousands of other prisoners were liberated by the U.S. on May 5, 1945.

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Looking at the posters, Kornfeld said he’s seen ones like these since childhood. It was back in Hungary where he would have to walk by similar flyers and people shouting hateful things at him like “stinky Jew” while he walked home.

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“I always went home with torn pants, because I was a kid that didn’t take it. When they fight, I fight,” Kornfeld said.

“Here I am, I made it.”

He doesn’t have an answer on how to stop these kinds of posters from cropping up, except education.

“What can we do about? Just live with it, fight it, or ignore it.”

And to the person or people who produce the neo-Nazi propaganda? Kornfeld doesn’t believe many would listen to “that kind of garbage”, and anyone who does needs mental help.

“What else is new in this world?” he joked.

New Westminster Police say investigators have opened a file on the incident and are working to find any suspects. So far they don’t have an exact number on how many posters were put up or if they are related to a rash of KKK posters distributed in Abbotsford last week.