From the Foreword by Phil Gurski
Former Senior Strategic Intelligence Analyst, Canadian Security Intelligence Service
The following is a summarized version of Phil Gurski’s foreword to When Is It Too Late?
Brian Claman’s book is both deeply personal and urgently relevant. Drawing on the experience of his mother and other European Jews during the Holocaust, Claman examines how rights, freedoms and security can be lost incrementally—and why it is so easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to believe that those living through history should have known what was coming.
Gurski particularly praises the book for challenging the assumption that European Jews simply failed to recognize the danger or waited too long to leave. Escape was neither simple nor always possible. The MS St. Louis, carrying 937 passengers—most of them Jewish—provides a powerful example: people who attempted to escape Nazi persecution were denied sanctuary and forced back toward Europe, where some would ultimately be murdered.
For Gurski, however, the book’s greatest importance lies in its relevance today. He emphasizes that contemporary Canada is not on the verge of another Holocaust, while warning that rising antisemitism, threats, vandalism and violence against Jewish institutions cannot simply be dismissed or normalized. The lesson of history is not that the present is identical to the 1930s, but that hatred must be confronted before it is allowed to become accepted or routine.
He also rejects the argument that too much has already been written about the Holocaust. Every documented survivor’s story contributes to our understanding of what happened and helps preserve the historical record at a time of Holocaust denial, distortion, misinformation and rising antisemitism.
Gurski describes Claman’s work as difficult at times because of the history it confronts, but ultimately essential reading. The story of Claman’s mother and others who survived serves not simply as remembrance, but as a warning about the danger of recognizing what is happening only after it has become too late.
— Summarized from the Foreword by Phil Gurski
Former Senior Strategic Intelligence Analyst, Canadian Security Intelligence Service
