Yom Hashoah memorial

PAT JOHNSON

In 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium. From the time he was two until he was four, Alex Buckman was passed between at least a dozen families, each of which risked their lives to conceal him. Eventually, fearing their own fate, each family would return him to be placed elsewhere.

When Buckman was four, he was returned to his home, where he saw his father, who directed him to a woman sitting in the kitchen and told the boy that she would be taking him on a long trip and that he had to behave bravely. His mother was in the bedroom.

“I wanted to see my mother, but I couldn’t do it,” he said. He could not say goodbye.

The woman stranger took Buckman and they ran through the night, eventually boarding the back of a truck, which drove them for two or three days before reaching a gate where his protector rang a bell, handed him over to a different woman, and disappeared. It was night; Buckman was brought in to a dormitory and put to bed.

“I thought of my mother and I cried myself to sleep,” he told the silent audience at the annual Yom Hashoah Commemorative Evening organized by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) April 18.

In the daytime, Buckman discovered that his parents had arranged for him and his cousin, Annie, to be sheltered in the same orphanage, where they would survive the war posing as sister and brother. Two weeks after he was placed in the orphanage, the Nazis came to his parents’ door, told them to pack a valise and board a truck. The other Jews of the neighborhood were there as well, beginning a deportation to Auschwitz.

On arrival at Auschwitz, the men and women were separated. In the chaos, Buckman’s mother found her sister but, moments later, the Nazis ordered the sister to the left, along with children, babies and the elderly, while his mother was told to go to the right. Panicked, she turned to a woman behind her in line, someone she knew from Brussels. What should she do? she asked.

As an orchestra played, Buckman’s mother left her place and rushed to her sister, who begged her to go back.

“Her sister told her, ‘Go back. You shouldn’t be here,’” Buckman said. When she tried to return to her place, she was blocked.

Buckman’s father had flat feet, which made it difficult to stand in place for long periods without becoming weak.

“In Auschwitz, there was no room for weak people,” said Buckman. “In November 1943, they murdered my mother at the age of 32. In December 1943, they murdered my father at the age of 31.”

Annie’s parents would survive and raise Buckman as their own. His aunt was sent to Ravensbrück, the women-only concentration camp north of Berlin, where she demonstrated an ability to work hard and was given a job in a factory office outside the camp. To appear vibrant, she pricked her finger with a pin and rouged her cheeks with blood.

While working in the office, she had a dangerous idea. She would pilfer bits of paper, a pencil and scissors, then write out recipes to create a cookbook.

“She wanted to remember life with her husband,” Buckman said. “In time, she wrote 110 recipes. Even though food was the most important thing in a concentration camp, she actually traded food for a needle and thread [to bind the book].”

Amid the disorder at the end of the war, she lost the recipe book but, decades later, it would find its way to Buckman.

She returned to Brussels and was reunited with her husband, who had miraculously survived 16 months in Buchenwald. Eventually, Buckman and Annie made it home as well.

“At age seven, I found out that I was an orphan,” Buckman said. “At that time, I knew that life would be different for me.”

Two years ago, Buckman went on the March of the Living, an experiential trip for Jewish youth that travels from the camps of Europe to the state of Israel. He joined more than 10,000 people, including students from 49 different countries, on the three-kilometre march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.

“We came to that gate where they have the famous sign, Arbeit Macht Frei,” he said. “We walked slowly. Most of us cried for what we saw. We saw shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. We saw mountains of glasses – so many. And we saw hair, hair belonging to women and children. Finally, we reached the room ... it was a shower room. In 2010, we were there in winter coats and we were freezing. In 1943, they were told to take off their clothes.

“My mother was in that room ... my mother and her sister and many, many others. They must have looked up and wondered when the water would come. It did not.

“I didn’t know until two years ago that the poison wasn’t very good and it took over 20 minutes for all these people to die. What I didn’t know was that all the women who wanted to survive ... with their own nails, they scratched the walls. We walked into that room and put our hands on the wall ... you could feel all those scratches. That’s when I decided to say goodbye to my mother ... when I touched that wall.”

Afterward, the 10,000 participants walked to Birkenau.

“As we were walking, they were calling the names of the people who were murdered. I heard my mother’s name,” Buckman said.

That evening, at the airport preparing to leave Poland, Buckman reflected on his traumatic history and his current journey.

“Tomorrow would be a better day,” he said. “We were going to fly to Israel.”

At the beginning of the Yom Hashoah Commemorative Evening, which took place at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Cathy Golden, who co-chairs the VHEC’s Yom Hashoah committee with Rome Fox and Ethel Kofsky, noted that her mother, Marie Doduck, and another local survivor, Robbie Waisman, were that day at Auschwitz as part of this year’s March of the Living.

Corrine Zimmerman, speaking as a member of the Second Generation, explained that the Holocaust is not an abstract historical event to families like hers. “Although we were born after the war, it is said we are the bridge between two worlds,” she said. The survivors who came to Vancouver became inextricably bound together, creating a “transcending meaning of family,” she explained, referring to aunts, uncles and cousins, “none of whom were actually related to me.”

Dr. Moira Stilwell, member of the Legislature for Vancouver-Langara, brought a message from the government of British Columbia and spoke of Jewish solidarity during the Holocaust.

Congregation Beth Israel Cantor Michael Zoosman chanted El Maleh Rachamim and Chaim Kornfeld said Kaddish. A youth choral ensemble sang under the direction of Wendy Bross Stuart, pianist and artistic producer of the evening with her husband, Ron Stuart. Claire Klein Osipov, joined by Zoosman, sang Yiddish lamentations. Andrew Brown played viola.

The evening was supported by the Gail Feldman Heller Endowment and the Sarah Rozenberg-Warm Memorial endowment funds of the VHEC, by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, the JCCGV and the province of British Columbia.

Holocaust survivors, who solemnly proceeded into the auditorium at the beginning of the ceremony, lit Yahrzeit candles. The evening ended with the traditional singing of “Zog Nit Keynmol,” the “Partisan Song.”

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

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