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To understand the horrible significance of clothing emblazoned with yellow badges, one doesn’t have to travel far from the leafy borough of Outremont.

A short distance down Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd., just beyond the borders of the tony Montreal enclave, is the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. This museum and cultural centre documents the atrocities the Nazis perpetrated against Europe’s Jews before and during the Second World War. Among the more chilling exhibits are the personal artifacts donated by local survivors of this not-so-distant genocide, many of whom immigrated to Montreal afterward.

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There is a starkly striped “uniform” worn by a prisoner who defied death at Auschwitz. There is a blanket, still bearing traces of blood, which probably meant the difference between life and death during a forced march.

And there is a yellow star.

The six-point symbol with the German word for “Jew” scrawled in its centre was the crude identification sign the Nazis forced the Jewish population to wear to deny them their rights, single them out for discrimination and, perhaps most crucially, dehumanize them as the “other.” The yellow star in the Holocaust centre’s collection was once worn by George Ehrman who, after living through the hell of multiple concentration and labour camps, started a new life in Montreal.