Lillian Boraks-Nemetz – Jewish Independent

Recalling heroism, Holocaust

Holocaust survivor Rita Akselrod and Premier John Horgan at the Yom Hashoah commemoration that took place at the British Columbia legislature May 2. (photo by Pat Johnson)

The history of Jewish tragedy in the Holocaust – but also the heroism of Jews and non-Jews – was commemorated last week in moving ceremonies in Vancouver and Victoria.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, occurred May 2 this year, coinciding with 27 Nissan in the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A community commemoration convened by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) took place on the evening of May 1 at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. The following day, Holocaust survivors and others gathered in Victoria at the British Columbia legislature with the premier of the province and many elected officials in what has become an official annual commemoration.

Premier John Horgan assisted survivors and representatives of other targeted groups – people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, Roma – to light candles of remembrance.

“We need to remember that, if we do not stand together – Christians, Jews, Muslims, those who have no faith at all – if we do not stand together when hate raises its head, we will have failed not only those that have lost their lives so many decades ago in the millions, but folks who will come after us,” said Horgan. “We acknowledge the murders in San Diego and the tragic loss of life in Pittsburgh … in a synagogue there. We acknowledge the loss of Christian lives in Sri Lanka and the loss of Muslim lives in New Zealand. But, on this Yom Hashoah, we must always remember, in the presence of those who survived those horrors, that today we stand with you, tomorrow we will stand with you and forever we will remember the impacts of your lives and the consequences that you have lived for so many decades.”

Marie Doduck, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Vancouver, shared some of her life story with the audience at the legislature.

“Living in Brussels, Belgium, I was only three-and-a-half years old when my life was suddenly ripped apart and irrevocably changed by hate, by Nazism,” she said. “In 1939, our family, which was made up of 10 children – three were already married at the time with children of their own – were all separated by the scourge of war. We were all put into peril by the fact of our Jewishness – a crime under the rule of Nazis in Europe. We were marked for death by the accident of being born Jewish.”

She was hidden in a succession of non-Jewish homes and even in a Catholic convent.

“We had to run and to vanish in order to survive,” she said. “We became the children of silence. No talking, no crying, no disturbance – a blank mind with no feelings and no future. We lived only in the moment, felt nothing except hunger. Feelings like loneliness were a luxury. It was better not to feel. People and the world did not care. We were nothing – just Jews.

“This frightened little girl, Mariette, saw her beloved family disappear. My mother, Channah Malka, whom my firstborn is named after, and my brother, Albert, were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. I saw my mother and brother being loaded into trucks…. That was the last time I saw either of them alive. Another brother, Jean, who was in the French Resistance, was hung by the Gestapo in the city square. Another brother, Simon, like hundreds of thousands, died three weeks after the war from the mistaken kindness of American and Canadian soldiers who liberated the camps and fed the fragile, thin and starving prisoners food that they could no longer digest.”

Like many survivors, Doduck’s experience is filled with close calls and fortunate near-misses.

“In order to survive, I jumped off moving trains and high buildings, was thrown into a sewer and was even hidden in a barn, where I took shelter in a bale of hay. I still bear the scar of being impaled by the pitch fork of a Nazi soldier searching there for Jews,” she said. “I lived mostly in darkness – literally – in dank cellars and other dark hiding places where the Nazis could not find me. When I returned to Brussels years later, I could not recognize the city in daylight, for my Brussels was a place of darkness.

After the war, Doduck immigrated to Canada as part of the War Orphans Project, the youngest of 1,123 Jewish children admitted to Canada in 1947 through an agreement between Canadian Jewish Congress and the federal immigration department.

“I arrived in Vancouver on Jan. 3, 1948, at age 12 and was taken in by a foster family,” said Doduck. “While I was warmly welcomed by the Jewish community and Canadian society – and grew up to be a proud Canadian – not everyone received a warm welcome when attempting to flee Nazi Germany. It was indeed the policy of many countries not to accept those seeking refuge.

“This is the important message that I share with students when I speak – that no society is immune to the dangers of discrimination and racism; and that we must work together to stand up when we see injustice in the world around us.”

B.C. Education Minister Rob Fleming, who emceed the event, noted the startling increase in antisemitic incidents in recent years and called for vigilance.

“Today also requires us to acknowledge the role that apathy and indifference played in enabling these atrocities to happen, the thousands of Jewish refugees turned away at our Canadian borders and the borders of other countries, the people who stood by and said nothing while their neighbours were hunted down in their homes because of their faith and identity,” said Fleming. “We come together to say never again.”

While mourning the atrocities, Fleming said, it is necessary to also remember the heroism of survivors and others who took the most dangerous risks to resist the dystopia of Nazism.

“They teach us that standing up for others, standing up for the values of tolerance and inclusiveness is how we can stop hate crimes, it’s how we can maintain and protect the peace that we are privileged to enjoy in our country.”

MLA Nicholas Simons played Kol Nidre on the cello to open the ceremony.

The evening before, the heroism of survivors was the topic of remarks from a member of the second generation. Carla van Messel, a board member of the VHEC, reflected on the lessons imparted by her father, Ies van Messel, who was a 5-year-old in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, at the start of the war.

“Throughout my life, my father has demonstrated to me how to transform tragic memories into the strength to do good,” she said. “He taught my family that our Jewishness doesn’t make us evil or other and, therefore, by the same reasoning, neither should someone’s Germanness or Polishness or Arabness. He taught me that, if we don’t want something like the Holocaust to happen again, we have to continue to be better than the Nazis, and better than the nations who stood idly by. We have to actively protect all people … despite the history, despite the wounds, despite the deaths.

“As a second-generation survivor, I am energized by the examples of the survivors among us. They have inoculated us with their strength and resilience, with their will to turn bad into good. I want our survivors to know that they are leaving their memories, their essence, in good hands. Among the second generation are upstanding citizens of today’s very complicated world. They have taken the pain of their family’s personal history and transmuted it into the positive energy of tikkun olam. They continue to translate the hate of antisemitism into a hate of injustices: of racism, of bigotry, of sexism, of the demonization of otherness, of discrimination in all its many, many forms.”

The keynote address at Vancouver’s JCC was delivered by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz.

“Not a day passes when I don’t ask myself: Why did I survive when six million perished?” she said. “When 1.5 million [of the murdered] were children and, among them, my 5-year-old sister. And I survived. Why? When every European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death by Hitler. I wonder: Was my survival a miracle? A twist of fate? The will of God? Why me?”

She detailed the series of close calls and fortunate happenstances that allowed her to survive, in part due to the persistence of her parents to do anything within their powers to save their two daughters.

The family was relocated into what would become the Warsaw Ghetto, sharing shelter with 20 other people in a three-room flat.

“Eventually, the ghetto grew more and more crowded – up to about 480,000 bodies in the small space of 1.3 square miles … with the lack of hygiene and medication, we were quarantined for typhus. Most of the boys and girls I played with died of the disease. Young children were dying on the streets; if not from illness, from starvation. Shabby and haunted people would simply pass by, powerless to help them,” she said.

“As 1942 approached, things got worse and worse. People out of desperation stole food from each other. I saw a woman carrying a bowl of soup when a man grabbed it. It spilled onto the pavement and the man fell to the floor licking the broth off the stones. All morality ceased to exist in an immoral, murderous universe of Nazi domination.”

As things in the ghetto deteriorated, Boraks-Nemetz’s parents bribed ghetto guards to allow young Lillian to escape. Her grandmother, who never entered the ghetto, had bought a little house in a nearby village, which she promised to give to a Catholic man who, in exchange, would let her live under his Polish name, ostensibly as siblings.

Boraks-Nemetz joined her grandmother and the man at the home.

“One night in the spring of 1943 we were outside in the yard, looking with horror at a blood-red sky above Warsaw,” she said. “We knew from a friend that it was the Warsaw Ghetto leveled to the ground by fire ordered by Hitler, after the courageous stand of the ghetto fighters against Nazi soldiers.”

Only after the war did she discover the fate of her sister.

“I found out that she was informed on by a Polish neighbour as a Jewish child and murdered by an unwilling Polish policeman who was commanded to do so, or else, by the Gestapo. The policeman found a ball lying on the street and threw it, telling my sister to run after it, then shot her in the back.”

While the Russians liberated her and her parents, Boraks-Nemetz said, the reality was not liberating.

“While adults worked to reestablish their lives, we children were left to grow up alone carrying the burden of experiences that nobody wanted to know about.… I was always told to forget and to let go by people who didn’t have a clue what was on my mind and in my soul. This was not a physical wound that results in a bruise or scab, which then falls off and mostly disappears. This was a branding on the Jewish soul with fire caused by man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child.

“It took me a long time after the war to realize myself as a human being who deserves to live and to be a Jew,” she said.

Philip Levinson, president of the VHEC board, introduced the procession of Holocaust survivors who lit candles in memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim and survivor Chaim Kornfeld led Kaddish. Under music director Wendy Bross Stuart, violinist Nancy di Novo and the Yom Hashoah singers performed songs in Ladino, Yiddish and Hebrew. Sarah Kirby-Yung, a Vancouver city councilor, brought greetings from the city and read a proclamation. The evening ended as it does every year with the singing of “Zog Nit Keynmol,” “The Partisan Song.”

Delving into the past

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz’s newest book, Mouth of Truth (Ekstasis Editions, 2017) is not an easy, escape-from-reality read, but it’s an interesting and important read. What does it mean to be a survivor? How does one person’s trauma affect those around them? Is healing possible? These are but a few of the many questions that Mouth of Truth elicits.

The novel is based on the experiences of Boraks-Nemetz, who is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, and survived the war by hiding under a false identity.

“My life’s story is, of course, similar to the book’s,” Boraks-Nemetz told the Independent. “I suffered in childhood, in adolescence, girlhood and womanhood. It is only now, in my senior years, that I have found some degree of peace.”

The protagonist of Mouth of Truth is Batya, who still struggles with Beata (Bea), her wartime identity, even though she has been in Canada for decades. Her Canadian-born husband, Joseph, and their children, Sam and Miriam, have no idea of the trauma with which she is attempting to deal. She drinks to suppress her more feisty Bea personality and their memories – not only of the ghetto, but of abuse by the man entrusted with her care, and others. Though this method of coping isn’t working, Batya manages to keep her nose above water until she accompanies her friend Antonia on a visit to see Antonia’s brother in prison. The visit unleashes recollections of her tragic childhood and Batya can no longer hide from herself or her past. She must confront her dueling identities – and rumours about her father.

Batya finds out that her father might have been one of the Jewish police in the ghetto; not only that, but one who did some awful things, including helping the Nazis round up Jews for deportation. On his deathbed, her father apologizes. But for what? Batya’s mother will not talk about what happened in the ghetto and Batya must find out for herself of what her father was guilty, if anything.

The investigation, as well as Batya’s healing, requires that she leave her family and home in Vancouver. She travels first to Toronto, then to Italy and Poland. In Italy, she meets Grisha, with whom she has an affair, and experiences passion and desire. She initially confuses her feelings with love, but comes to realize the difference as she and Grisha travel together in Poland.

Between her research in Toronto and in Europe, Batya learns much about her father. She is also helped by her mother. When Batya first arrives in Toronto, her mother – who has never wanted to talk about the war – sends Batya a package of her father’s writings. Batya receives a second package when she returns from Europe.

With the first package, her mother writes, “I had always thought that because you were a mere child when all that happened to us, it would not touch you. Could I have been wrong?” Her mother also clearly states, “I have chosen to forget the past and start a new life. I don’t want to go back there either.”

In the note accompanying the second package, her mother concedes, “By shielding you, I may have done more harm than good. No matter what you might think of your father, he was a good man.” She also writes, “It never occurred to me before that I owe you the truth. Maybe I have kept secrets from you for too long.”

Batya, too, has secrets. Though she tried several times, she was not able to tell her children what happened to her during the war. As for her father’s actions, she had no idea herself, until Antonia told her the rumours. In addition to being the bearer of the news, however, Antonia opens the door for Batya to start facing her past, connecting Batya with the son of the woman who supposedly witnessed the actions of Batya’s father.

It is through her relationship with the son, Julian, who lives in Toronto, that Batya comes to tell her story – and start living. He encourages her to give a survivor testimony – “Survivors are no longer silent,” he tells her – and she does. Despite her fears, and with Julian’s support, she invites her children to watch her videotaped testimony. Afterward, they have a much-needed, overdue discussion. “One or even two conversations cannot erase the years of accumulated unhappiness and poor communication,” acknowledges Batya. “But today was a start.”

To read the first chapter of Mouth of Truth, visit lillianboraks-nemetz.com. To buy the book ($26.95), visit ekstasiseditions.com. Boraks-Nemetz will read from the novel and participate in a Q&A on Sept. 14, 2 p.m., at Waldman Library. She will also be participating in this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, which takes place Nov. 25-30.

Continuing the legacy

It’s a wonder any of us are alive. And it’s even more a wonder that we are each the result of generations (not to mention stardust). Not only do genes past and present influence who we are, but the actions of our ancestors, both distant and recent, brought us to where we are today. And we are but a moment in time, a link to future generations.

It’s hard not to get sentimental and contemplative reading Living Legacies: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women (PK Press, 2014). In this instance, Volume 4 that Toronto-based editor Liz Pearl has brought to life; though the previous editions are equally thought-inspiring. Volume 5 is already well in the works.

Among the more than 20 contributors to Volume 4 is Pearl with an essay on her name, Lisbeth Anne Ahuva Pearl Katz, though she has been known as Liz since 1990 and rarely uses her husband’s surname. “I have always liked the name Pearl – a rare and precious gem, and have never considered it just my maiden name,” she writes. “Pearl is a central piece of my name and core identity.” As is her namesake, her maternal great-grandmother Liba Sherashevsky Gitkin, z”l. Born in Lithuania, Liba and her family all died in the Holocaust; her grandmother, Sonia bat Liba, “managed to emigrate in 1935 [to Canada], following a brief courtship and quick marriage” – “the sole surviving member of her family-of-origin.”

About to volunteer as a chaperone on a March of the Living trip, Pearl reflects on the “strong values of Zionism, Yiddishkeit, tzedakah and Jewish education that were central” to her grandmother’s life, which she gained from her mother and others of that generation, and which she passed on to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and counting. “My namesake and maternal lineage are firmly embedded with history, heritage and wisdom, and form the roots of my solid Canadian Jewish identity.”

Other contributors echo these types of thoughts and feelings. Local author Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a child survivor of the Holocaust, dedicates her essay, called “Sacrifice,” to her “beloved grandmother, Kazimira Solomon Boraks (1878-1949).” Describing a moment in Russia in the summer of 2010, she writes, “I stand on the shore of the city of the Bronze Horseman, searching the horizon, scanning it for clues to a woman who was born here long before the city became Leningrad, who spent her life in exile, and who died in exile, away from her homeland and her family. A woman who saved my life – my babushka, grandmother in Russian.”

Boraks-Nemetz briefly recounts some of her memories of her years in hiding, the physical and emotional effects of what she experienced and witnessed, her grandfather’s death in the ghetto, and her father’s death only weeks before her grandmother’s in 1948. She notes some of the similarities in their lives – hers and her grandmother’s – and she explains the sacrifices her grandmother made to keep her alive. It is a loving and moving tribute.

Each essay in Living Legacies has something to recommend it. Not all are as deeply serious but all are personal, yet universal. Gratitude is one of the words that comes to mind after reading this collection. Looking at life in the context of the generations before and still to come is both humbling and empowering.

Korczak’s legacy now

Left to right, keynote speaker Irwin Elman and panelists Rachel Malek, James Copping and Jess Boon. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

“Children are not the people of tomorrow but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they are meant to be.”

Polish doctor, educator, writer and orphanage director Janusz Korczak’s philosophy and writing laid the foundation for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Murdered in 1942 at Treblinka with the almost 200 children in his care, Korczak’s work and life remain relevant to this day.

Jerry Nussbaum, president of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada (JKAC), was one of the many speakers on Sept. 29 to remind the approximately 70 people in attendance of this fact. “We hold this lecture series in his honor,” said Nussbaum, “because we seek to follow his example of respecting children and honoring the whole child.”

“How to Love a Child”: The Janusz Korczak Lecture Series is co-organized by the JKAC and the faculty of education at the University of British Columbia, with contributions from other faculties, universities, activists and advocates. The first of six lectures was called Keeping our Promise to Children: The Relevance of Korczak’s Legacy for Children Today. It featured as keynote speaker Irwin Elman, provincial advocate for children and youth of Ontario, and president of the Canadian Council of Child and Youth Advocates.

Other speakers included moderator Dr. Charles Ungerleider, director of research and managing partner of Directions Evidence and Policy Research Group, LLP; Marni Point, who welcomed attendees to the traditional and unceded Musqueam territory; Dr. Krzysztof Olendhi, ambassador titulaire, consul general of the Republic of Poland in Vancouver; and. Dr. Blye Frank, dean and professor, UBC faculty of education. The most poignant tribute came from child survivor Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, board member of JKAC, author and UBC instructor.

“Korczak has been my hero all my life,” she said. Both she and Korczak were among those held in the Warsaw Ghetto. She spoke of going to school secretly until one day two Nazis came in and pushed the teachers around (they were sent to prison) – “we children sat there frozen in fear for quite some time, then the teachers sent us home. The next day, the school was boarded up. And that is what I remember, clutching my father’s hand ever so tightly while looking into the cellar through a little window at the now-empty grey room, where once there was life, color and learning. I had lost my right to education.”

Her father took her to Korczak’s orphanage. Even though the doctor was not in, they were welcomed, and she saw the children reading and doing artwork, seemingly happy “inside this space, as if the horror of the ghetto and the threat of the always-impending danger didn’t exist. This was Dr. Korczak’s world…. I had the impression that the doctor also tried to raise the children’s spirits during the terrible times in which they lived.”

She described the deportations; she, her mother and little sister narrowly missing the transport cars to Treblinka when a commotion distracted the guards and her father managed to save them out of the line. “We were lucky, not so Dr. Korczak and his children, who were destined to walk along the same route.”

On Aug. 5, 1942, the Nazis came for the children of the orphanage. While he was offered a reprieve, “Korczak refused, saying I hate desertion and besides, my children need me.

“Father often spoke of that day and how Korczak’s 200 orphans were ordered out of the building and made to march through the Warsaw Ghetto with Korczak at the helm, holding a small child in his arms and one little one by the hand. They were carrying the green banner of King Matthew, the character in his [Korczak’s] popular book for children about a child king who fought for children’s rights…. No survivor who was there at that time can forget the long procession. Many wrote about it.”

Boraks-Nemetz said her father often spoke about Korczak and taught her his principles, principles she followed in raising her own children. She concluded her remarks with the poem “And Still They March” by Yala Korwin, before presenting the first JKAC scholarship award to UBC PhD student Matthew Lee for his work on children’s social and emotional development.

When Elman began his keynote address, he admitted that he only learned about Korczak about 15 years ago, on a trip to Japan, where he was invited to “help them learn about children’s rights and to help teach them to elevate the voice of children.” When visiting a children’s home – an institution that can have as many as 200 children living in it – a staff member mentioned Korczak and was amazed when Elman, a Jewish educator who had worked with children for 20 years at that point, did not know the name.

Elman has since learned enough to know that Korczak’s work and life are relevant. “In Canada today, there are approximately 350,000 children connected to care in one way or another…. Some say that there are as many as two million former Crown wards … in this country.”

Speaking of his home province, he said there were 23,000 kids in Ontario living in some form of care, 8,000-10,000 permanently (ie. Crown wards, which, in British Columbia, are called continued custody orders) – and they are not doing well. Of those, more than 18% are aboriginal; in British Columbia, it’s 60-65%; in other provinces even higher. “It’s not hard to understand and listen to and hear the echoes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, and the need to address this over-representation of First Nations children across the country in our systems of care.”

In Ontario, he said, children can only come into care if a social worker (or somebody in such a capacity) has deemed the child in need of protection – from abuse or neglect – and a court has agreed. The children have not done anything wrong.

When the state takes children into care, said Elman, “You’re making a promise to them. The first thing, obviously, is, you’re protected now. The second thing is … if you’re permanently in our care, we’re going to take care of you … we’re going to ensure that you’re going to live to your full potential. And, when that child is brought into care, what do they hear? Maybe we don’t say it, but they hear, we’re going to love you, it’s OK now.”

But, he said, only 40% of children in care in Ontario graduate from high school, and that percentage doesn’t vary much between provinces; 43% of the homeless population of Canada have had an in-care experience. Young people connected to care are over-represented in the justice and mental health systems.

Elman shared many stories of his work as the province’s advocate. When somebody steps up for a child, he said – whether it be a community, foster parents, a group home, adoptive parents, anyone – “the government needs to say thank you, we’ve got your back, what do you need? We’ll do whatever is necessary, because we owe our children a home in which they are nurtured and loved…. That takes a whole different way of thinking about child welfare.”

He has been told, “We can’t legislate love.” His response is, “I don’t think you can legislate love, but I do think you can create conditions in which love can flourish. The government should be all over that… And, to do that, they need to ask young people and they need to ask children and they need to ask their caregivers in whatever form that is…. We owe that to children.”

If we took that approach, he said, if children in care were listened to, they would feel in charge of their own lives. If they knew what was in their files and had a say in what was written there, they would contribute to making policy, they would have a say in where they lived. Social and child-care workers would be trained differently, including respecting all the different cultures from which children in care come. “Many practical, revolutionary things … would happen in the way in which the system is run if children felt listened to.”

Panelists Rachel Malek, Jess Boon and James Copping – all members of the Federation of B.C. Youth in Care Networks – joined Elman on stage for a 35-minute Q&A. Questioners wanted to know more about the criteria for a child going into care, how to create a sense of belonging for a child and ensure their safety, how to reduce the number of children in care, the impact of poverty, and which programs in Canada reflect Korczak’s philosophy.

As the final question, the consul general asked the young panelists, all of whom had experienced the care system, “What does it mean to you to love a child?” Boon spoke of commitment, being there for the serious and fun times but also investing in your own education to give back to the community. Copping mentioned consistency in home, support for school, having someone on whom to rely through thick and thin. For Malek, it is to be vulnerable – to open your heart, to recognize that it’s a two-way street, to be willing to go the extra mile for a child.

The next lecture in the Korczak series takes place Oct. 29, 7 p.m., at UBC Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre. Registration is required via jklectures.educ.ubc.ca.

Contribute to Legacies

PK Press is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of Living Legacies: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women. Edited by Liz Pearl – a Toronto-based educator and therapist specializing in psychogeriatrics and the expressive art therapies – the collection includes personal narratives, mini-memoirs and legacy writing from women across the country.

image - Living Legacies Vol. 4 cover — PK Press is now accepting submissions for the fifth volume of *Living Legacies*.

“What Living Legacies clearly indicates is that, in fact, we do not need to open our TV sets or buy glossy magazines to find inspiration. It is truly in our midst and we seem to have forgotten that our most profound life lessons can come from our mothers, sisters, girlfriends, children and, yes, ourselves. Liz has brought new meaning to the word legacy by making it so contemporary and alive. Her notion that we need to celebrate the legacies in our midst is unique; we all need to look around ourselves and rejoice in this wisdom,” writes Ina Fichman, president/producer of Intuitive Pictures Montreal, in the foreword to the fourth volume, which was published last year. One of the contributors to that collection is Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, with a story called “Sacrifice.”

Each volume of Living Legacies is available for purchase at a cost of $20 per copy plus shipping, and there is an order form online (at.yorku.ca/pk/ll-order.htm). PK Press updates are on Facebook, facebook.com/PKPress. For submission guidelines, email Pearl at [email protected].

Life-changing March for survivor

Teens on this year’s March of the Living helped Lillian Boraks-Nemetz face down haunting memories. (photo by Adele Lewin Photography)

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a Vancouver poet and author who was a child survivor of the Holocaust, initially declined the offer of a trip to her Polish homeland. She had been there, and written books and poems about her experiences as a child and as a returning adult. She didn’t know that an invitation to go again would lead to an emotional and psychological closure for which she had waited seven decades.

When first invited to participate in last spring’s Canadian contingent of March of the Living, Boraks-Nemetz demurred. March of the Living is a program that brings Jewish young people from around the world to the sites of Nazi atrocities in Europe and then to the Jewish homeland of Israel, marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust memorial day, and traveling to Israel in time for Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s remembrance day for fallen soldiers, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli independence day. March of the Living’s teenage participants are accompanied by Holocaust survivors.

“I thought, how am I going to keep up with a bunch of 16-, 17-year-olds?” Boraks-Nemetz said in a recent interview. But she was assured that survivors are well taken care of on the trips and she was convinced to go.

“There were difficulties, but I rose to the occasion,” she said, laughing. On the extremely long day traveling from Canada to Poland, which then continued immediately with more travel and programming, Boraks-Nemetz was aided by one of the young participants. “One of the girls had chocolate that had extra caffeine in it, so she gave it to me,” she explained.

Boraks-Nemetz was accompanied by another survivor, chaperones and young people from Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa, as well as eight Jewish teens from Vancouver. In all, there were 78 people on the trip. (Young people from Ontario and Quebec made up their own contingents and traveled on different buses.)

The program was intensive. The week in Poland involved stays in Krakow and Warsaw, where they visited the Museum of Polish Jews, and they went to the extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.

“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything. You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”

“The young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything,” she said. “You could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.”

In Warsaw, they also went to the orphanage that had been run by Janusz Korczak. A Polish Jew who was a respected published author, Korczak was offered multiple opportunities to save himself from the advancing Final Solution. When the Warsaw Ghetto was created, Korczak’s orphanage, its staff and nearly 200 young charges were forced to move into the ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, in 1942, Korczak was again offered immunity, but instead stayed with his orphaned children as they were deported to Treblinka.

In Lodz, the group visited the cemetery and the place where the second-largest Nazi-enforced Jewish ghetto had been. (More than 200,000 Jews were held in Lodz Ghetto during its existence. About 10,000 of those were alive in 1945.) There, the Canadians boarded one of the rail cars that had transported Jews to the camps.

“It was dark and there were many of us,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “It was tight. It was scary. We got the feel of it. Of course, the fear wasn’t there, but there was something foreboding about it.”

At the camps, the participants said prayers and sang mournful songs.

“There was a lot of poetry,” she said. “I brought my book Ghost Children, which was written after one of my trips there. And, whenever we went to a certain place, I would read a poem and it really got to them.”

An unexpected insight came during conversations with young Polish Jews during an arranged dinner at the hotel in Warsaw.

“They sat down, one at each table of students, so they were able to talk,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “At the end of the dinner, I saw the five or six of them standing in the lobby of the hotel, the Polish Jews, and so I went to talk to them. We went to the side and it was really interesting what they told me. They’re quite modern. They’re a little bit shy. They’re a big change from the Israeli youth,” she said, laughing.

The young Polish Jews told her that things were pretty good for them. Some go abroad – to France or elsewhere – to study, but jobs are hard to find and the standard of living isn’t great. They had a question about March of the Living.

“They said, ‘Why do you always come here looking for what’s dead?’ And I explained to them that this is an educational trip,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “But they said, ‘You know, there are some of us here, there is beauty here too, we are alive and there is a Jewish community – small, but there is a Jewish community. And I could see that that was maybe something to address.”

From Poland, the group flew El-Al to Israel.

“It’s like walking in from the shadow into light,” she said. “The Jerusalem of Gold! And we went straight to Masada off the plane.”

There, the other survivor on the trip, Max Iland, an octogenarian from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., celebrated his bar mitzvah, a few decades late.

“The students were singing and he and I were dancing, it was really fantastic,” said Boraks-Nemetz.

The entire experience, she said, was life-altering for the participants.

“They felt that their Jewishness was strengthened, that they are a part of history,” she said. “They cherish their homes and their families after finding out what happened to Jews over there. And, above all … they were becoming witnesses to my story. That’s what one of them said. She felt she was a witness to it. I did speak to them about the legacy that we, survivors who were on our way out, are leaving them.”

Boraks-Nemetz found especially notable the connection of young Canadian Jews to those who had given their lives in defence of the Jewish state.

“What I didn’t realize was how strongly they feel about the fallen soldiers who fought for Israel,” she said. “They read poetry again to the fallen soldiers.”

When the national moment of silence came, the experience was transfixing.

“We’re standing on [Tel Aviv’s central street] Ben Yehuda and the sirens sounded and, all of a sudden, it was like everyone was made of wax figures. That was an incredible thing.”

For Boraks-Nemetz, the trip provided an unexpected closure to the darkest chapter of her life.

photo - Lillian Boraks-Nemetz — Lillian Boraks-Nemetz accompanied teens on this year’s March of the Living. *(photo by Adele Lewin Photography)*

For her, the climactic moments of the March of the Living took place in the small Polish village of Zalesie. It was here that young Lillian survived the Holocaust in hiding. After spending two years in the Warsaw Ghetto, she was smuggled out by her father before the ghetto was liquidated and its residents – more than a quarter million Jews – were sent to Treblinka and other death camps. Outside the ghetto, she was met by a Christian woman who transported her to a little white home in Zalesie, where her grandmother was in hiding, posing as the wife of the Polish man who lived there.

Boraks-Nemetz has written about that time in her poetry and in her book for young adults, The Old Brown Suitcase. As an adult, she has returned to the little house at Spokojna Street, Number 16. But this visit was different.

“These two buses went down this dusty road, and there were all these [people in] houses wondering what was going on,” she said. “Nobody bothered us. We filed out and we went into the garden. We all stood in the garden and I told them the story of hiding.”

There was one part of the story she hadn’t intended to tell, but she had developed closeness and trust with the participants accompanying her. She felt confident and compelled to share more than she ever had before, which led to an unprecedented emotional catharsis after almost seven decades.

“I told them something about the man with whom we were in hiding. He was both good and bad,” Boraks-Nemetz said. “How does a child of eight take that? That, on the one hand, he saved us, our lives, and, on the other hand, he was a drunk who could have given us away and didn’t, and, thirdly, he abused me when my grandmother wasn’t there. This is life and that’s how it was.”

In small groups of six or eight, the young people accompanied Boraks-Nemetz into the home.

“When we went into the house, I explained where I slept and where I stood by the window and watched for my parents to come, the road, the garden, the whole thing,” she said. “They were very moved, and a funny thing happened. Each time a group would come out, I would come out with them onto the little porch and they would all hug me. Every one of them. And I think what happened to me was probably, for the first time in my life, I was able to face what happened there. That was an awesome experience for me. I had been there before many times but I always blocked it out. I never faced it properly. And, this time, because of the kids … I just couldn’t believe how it opened me up, this experience with the kids.”

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