The Museum row in Canada - Poles and Ukrainians unite.

Opposition appears to be intensifying to plans to dedicate a specific “zone” to the Holocaust in the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, while the museum devotes another, single gallery to covering what could be at least 50 other mass atrocities.

Both the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Canadian Polish Congress are urging the museum, under construction in Winnipeg and scheduled to open early in 2013, to reconsider what CPC president Teresa Berezowski calls “an inequitable display of what has happened in the world that has gone against human rights.”

However, the Polish congress is upset that for the mass atrocity zone to cover its subject, it will have to do so on “a rotary basis,” said Berezowski. Having “a separate, permanent room that says ‘the Holocaust’ leaves you questioning what the value is of all the other people who died otherwise ... Without minimizing the Holocaust, we just feel that whole idea of ‘mass atrocities’ has to be rethought and perhaps have a larger display area in which the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide, those things, [are] part and parcel of that,” she said.

Two weeks ago in a letter to CMHR president Stuart Murray (and copied to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, among others), Berezowski said the CPC is “hopeful” that if the mass atrocity zone comes to pass, “a central focus” will be the sufferings inflicted on Poles by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, “as well as on other Eastern Europeans."

Without minimizing the Holocaust, we just feel that whole idea of ‘mass atrocities’ has to be rethought and perhaps have a larger display area in which the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide, those things, [are] part and parcel of that,” she said.