{"id":6641,"date":"2014-08-22T12:14:46","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T19:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=6641"},"modified":"2014-08-21T12:17:33","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T19:17:33","slug":"life-changing-march-for-survivor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/08\/22\/life-changing-march-for-survivor\/","title":{"rendered":"Life-changing March for survivor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teens on this year\u2019s March of the Living helped Lillian Boraks-Nemetz face down haunting memories. (photo by Adele Lewin Photography)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t know that an invitation to go again would lead to an emotional and psychological closure for which she had waited seven decades.<\/p>\n

When first invited to participate in last spring\u2019s 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<\/em>, Holocaust memorial day, and traveling to Israel in time for Yom Hazikaron<\/em>, Israel\u2019s remembrance day for fallen soldiers, and Yom Ha\u2019atzmaut<\/em>, Israeli independence day. March of the Living\u2019s teenage participants are accompanied by Holocaust survivors.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, how am I going to keep up with a bunch of 16-, 17-year-olds?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were difficulties, but I rose to the occasion,\u201d 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. \u201cOne of the girls had chocolate that had extra caffeine in it, so she gave it to me,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe young people who came with us are so beautiful and so good and so well behaved and so moved by everything,\u201d she said. \u201cYou could just see how they took it all in. For them, it was a life-changing experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was dark and there were many of us,\u201d said Boraks-Nemetz. \u201cIt was tight. It was scary. We got the feel of it. Of course, the fear wasn\u2019t there, but there was something foreboding about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the camps, the participants said prayers and sang mournful songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a lot of poetry,\u201d she said. \u201cI brought my book Ghost Children<\/em>, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

An unexpected insight came during conversations with young Polish Jews during an arranged dinner at the hotel in Warsaw.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey sat down, one at each table of students, so they were able to talk,\u201d said Boraks-Nemetz. \u201cAt 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\u2019re quite modern. They\u2019re a little bit shy. They\u2019re a big change from the Israeli youth,\u201d she said, laughing.<\/p>\n

The young Polish Jews told her that things were pretty good for them. Some go abroad \u2013 to France or elsewhere \u2013 to study, but jobs are hard to find and the standard of living isn\u2019t great. They had a question about March of the Living.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said, \u2018Why do you always come here looking for what\u2019s dead?\u2019 And I explained to them that this is an educational trip,\u201d said Boraks-Nemetz. \u201cBut they said, \u2018You know, there are some of us here, there is beauty here too, we are alive and there is a Jewish community \u2013 small, but there is a Jewish community. And I could see that that was maybe something to address.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Poland, the group flew El-Al to Israel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like walking in from the shadow into light,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Jerusalem of Gold! And we went straight to Masada off the plane.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

\u201cThe students were singing and he and I were dancing, it was really fantastic,\u201d said Boraks-Nemetz.<\/p>\n

The entire experience, she said, was life-altering for the participants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey felt that their Jewishness was strengthened, that they are a part of history,\u201d she said. \u201cThey cherish their homes and their families after finding out what happened to Jews over there. And, above all \u2026 they were becoming witnesses to my story. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

\u201cWhat I didn\u2019t realize was how strongly they feel about the fallen soldiers who fought for Israel,\u201d she said. \u201cThey read poetry again to the fallen soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the national moment of silence came, the experience was transfixing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re standing on [Tel Aviv\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Boraks-Nemetz, the trip provided an unexpected closure to the darkest chapter of her life.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz accompanied teens on this year’s March of the Living.\u00a0(photo by Adele Lewin Photography)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u2013 more than a quarter million Jews \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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

\u201cThese two buses went down this dusty road, and there were all these [people in] houses wondering what was going on,\u201d she said. \u201cNobody 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was one part of the story she hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told them something about the man with whom we were in hiding. He was both good and bad,\u201d Boraks-Nemetz said. \u201cHow 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\u2019t, and, thirdly, he abused me when my grandmother wasn\u2019t there. This is life and that\u2019s how it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

In small groups of six or eight, the young people accompanied Boraks-Nemetz into the home.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThey 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 \u2026 I just couldn\u2019t believe how it opened me up, this experience with the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pat Johnson<\/strong> is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teens on this year\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[53,1794,1795],"class_list":["post-6641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-holocaust","tag-lillian-boraks-nemetz","tag-march-of-the-living"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}