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OTTAWA — A man in a blue turban stood among thousands in toques, fur hats and yarmulkes in Poland on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Tim Uppal was there as the head of the official Canadian delegation for the commemoration ceremony, a role in keeping with his post as Canada’s minister of state for multiculturalism.

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But Mr. Uppal has championed the importance of Holocaust remembrance for much longer, an unusual role for a Sikh member of Parliament from an Edmonton-area riding with only a few hundred Jews.

“There is so much we can learn from what happened here,” he said over the phone from Krakow, ahead of his visit to the camp where an estimated 1.1 million were killed during the Second World War.

“And you can take those lessons and apply it to the present.”

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Toronto Conservative MP Mark Adler lives those lessons daily; his father Abram survived internment at Auschwitz and made his home in Toronto after the war.