Abby Wener Herlin

Reflecting back 80 years

At the community’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah, child survivor Janos Benisz spoke about his experiences during the Holocaust. (photo by Rhonda Dent)

Over the past year, Janos Benisz has watched the news of Ukrainian parents fleeing to Poland and elsewhere in Europe to find safety for their families. While “overjoyed” for the families finding refuge today, he cannot help but reflect back eight decades to his own family’s catastrophic history in that violence-ravaged region.

Benisz was born in the summer of 1938 in the Hungarian city of Esztergom. He is one of the very few children to survive the Nazi concentration camps and is now one of an even smaller number of survivors alive to share their stories of survival. He spoke April 17 at the annual Yom Hashoah Commemoration presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Benisz lost his mother in 1943, when she was 38, after she went to hospital for a routine procedure but was, he said, murdered by a fascist there. His father remarried and his stepmother would prove a saviour for the boy.

The following year, the Nazis began rounding up Hungarian Jews and preparing to transport them to forced labour and death camps.

“Like a plague of locusts, the SS came marching into our city,” he recalled. “As they marched past our house, there was a great fear in our family. My father closed the windows and pulled the curtains down and his fear was passed on to me. The next day, we left our home and on the front of our white stucco home was a yellow Magen David. Within hours, an SS commander came to our house and put stickers on our valuables.”

His father took young Janos and his stepmother to relations who were Catholic. It was the last time he saw his father.

“Life was wonderful for six weeks until one of the neighbours reported us and informed that Jews were in this home,” said Benisz.

An SS officer accompanied by Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists knocked on the door and seized Janos and his stepmother, who were sent to the Strasshof concentration camp, in Austria. They remained there for eight or nine months, until liberated by Soviet forces. Benisz credits his stepmother’s determination for his survival.

“It was like a lioness protecting her cub,” he said. “She would go into the circle where the food was, or the slop was, with the big cup and she would always bring food to me. I would drink it and that sustained me.”

After liberation, Janos, 7, and his now-mother made their way back to Esztergom. The devastation was nearly total.

“I had many, many cousins and they all were massacred,” he said. “My mother’s family … it was like the earth had opened up and killed them all.”

The experiences left Janos’s stepmother mentally broken and Janos was placed in an orphanage.

“The only thing I remember is cod liver oil in the morning and brushing my teeth with about 10 or 15 guys beside me brushing their teeth as well,” he said. “After two-and-a-half years in the orphanage, somebody from the Joint [Distribution Committee] picked me up, took me to the train station. There were 14 or 15 other Jewish orphans there and they told us, ‘You’re going to America – North America.’”

The group first spent six months in France, where “they tried to educate us,” he said, but the young survivors were like “a bunch of wild animals.”

The group arrived in Halifax on Dec. 3, 1948. They were given hot soup and delicious sandwiches, as well as ice cream, of which Benisz said he must have eaten a gallon with his bare hands.

On the train across Canada, orphans disembarked at different cities and Benisz arrived in Winnipeg in the midst of a blizzard.

“My first Canadian Jewish home proved to be a disaster,” he said. “I was bounced around like a basketball between foster homes.… I was never part of the family. I was always an outsider.”

The terrors that followed him from Europe, which led to screaming in the night, did not make him a welcome addition to potential foster homes.

“Who wants to have a stranger’s scream waking [one] up every night?” he asked.

He was put in a reformatory for about six months before a Jewish welfare agency rescued him and found him suitable housing and got him caught up in his education.

At a young age, Benisz got a job as a copy boy at the Winnipeg Free Press. A life in the news business followed, especially covering sports, which he did at newspapers across Western Canada. An editor changed his byline from Janos Benisz to Jack Bennett, which became his professional designation.

Eventually, he arrived to a new job at a Vancouver daily just as the press launched what would become a year-long strike. Jack Diamond, the late Jewish businessman and philanthropist, gave Benisz a job. Years later, after a corporate buyout, Benisz had a $25,000 windfall and he and a partner opened a business in Gastown, “and, over the next 15, 18 years, we made a lot of money.”

He spoke of his gratitude for the community of survivors, especially the Child Survivors Group, based at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. For two decades, he has spoken to school groups and others about his Holocaust experiences.

“I speak on behalf of the six million who have no voice, that includes 1.5 million children who were murdered,” he said.

At the commemorative event, Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom reflected on the longer, formal name of the day, which is Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. He emphasized the resistance and revolt inherent in both the name of the day and the fact that Yom Hashoah is marked annually on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

“Our sacred purpose is so much more important, so much more vital, because the life-memory is fading. We gather here this evening at the twilight of an era. As the Survivors’ Declaration hauntingly observes, the age of the Holocaust survivors is drawing to a close. Before long, no one will be left to say, I was there, I saw, I remember what happened…. It is in this void that the deniers and the distortionists will come, they always do, as they have continually on every night and every day since even before the liberation of the camps, to say that this didn’t happen, that it wasn’t so bad or the relativism of comparing trauma to trauma.”

There is one significant difference between the contemporary generation and the generation of the 1930s, said the rabbi.

“That difference is that we have the experience that they didn’t have. We know it can happen because it did,” he said. “We know the antisemitism, if it is not confronted vigourously, forcefully and immediately defeated, can develop into monstrous dimensions. So, we don’t have the luxury or the privilege to say, let’s wait and see how things will develop, how this turns out.”

The VHEC’s Abby Wener Herlin, granddaughter of survivors Aurelia and David Gold, spoke as a representative of the third generation.

“In our family, in order to build a life and live each day, they could not speak about their experiences,” she recalled of her late grandparents. “In order to protect themselves and us from the atrocities and traumas of their past, they shared very little.

“There is a sense of weight that comes from being the grandchild of Holocaust survivors,” Wener Herlin continued, “to know that I am part of the last generation that will ever hear those stories firsthand. I feel it is my duty and responsibility to carry it forward and it is my duty to remember.”

In a video presentation, former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler discussed the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, as well as the Holocaust, and said that what makes both historical instances so horrific are not just the horrors themselves but that both atrocities were preventable.

“Nobody could say that we did not know. We knew but we did not act,” said Cotler.

He addressed remarks specifically to survivors: “You have endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow you found the resources of your own humanity, the ability to carry on, to build families and to make an enduring contribution to Canada and to the communities in which you settled.”

Corinne Zimmerman, board president of the VHEC, read from a statement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released for Yom Hashoah and Moskovitz read a message from B.C. Premier David Eby. Sarah Kirby-Yung, Vancouver city councilor, read a proclamation from Mayor Ken Sim.

Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer for the martyrs. An extensive musical program, produced by Wendy Bross Stuart and Ron Stuart, featured Bross Stuart on piano, Eric Wilson on cello, with Cantor Shani Cohen, Kat Palmer, Lisa Osipov Milton singing, as well as eight young voices collectively dubbed the Yom Hashoah Singers.

The evening was presented by the VHEC with the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and Temple Sholom.

Legacy of the “Ghetto girls”

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, left, interviews author and historian Dr. Judy Batalion at this year’s Kristallnacht commemorative event on Nov. 4. (screenshot)

Jewish girls and young women in Poland were uniquely positioned to play major roles in the resistance to Nazism – and the stories of countless young heroines have been too long overlooked.

This was a key message at the Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 4. Held virtually for the second year in a row, it featured Canadian historian Judy Batalion. Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, program and development manager of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the author and posed questions.

Jewish girls and women were not subject to the irrefutable proof of Jewishness that Jewish men were, said Batalion.

“Women were not circumcised, so they didn’t risk being found out in a pants-drop test,” she said. “If a man on the outside [of the ghettos] was suspected of being Jewish, he would be told at gunpoint to drop his pants, and women didn’t have that physical marker of their Jewishness on their body.”

A secondary reason women could play such an important role in the resistance was that, at that time in Poland, education was mandatory to Grade 8. Many Jewish families sent their sons to Jewish schools or yeshivot. “But, to save on tuition, they sent girls to Polish public schools,” Batalion explained. “In these public schools, girls became more acculturated and … more assimilated women. They were girls and teenagers who had Catholic friends. They were aware of Christian rituals, habits, nuances, behaviour.”

Resistance fighters and underground operatives might have dyed their hair blonde or otherwise altered their outward appearance to pass as Christians. But there was more to it, the author said.

“Gesticulation was very Jewish,” she said. “So one woman had to wear a muff when she went undercover, to control her hands.”

Batalion’s book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos is the culmination of 12 years of research, which had its beginnings in another project.

Batalion was in the British Library doing research for a performance piece she was working on about Hannah Senesh, a young female hero of the resistance whose story is perhaps among the more well known. Senesh was born in Hungary and had made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in the 1930s, but she returned from that comparatively safe haven to join the fight against the Nazis.

“She joined the Allied forces, became a paratrooper and volunteered to return to Nazi-occupied Europe,” Batalion said of Senesh, who the author first learned about in Grade 5 in Montreal. “She was caught quite early on but legend has it she looked her executioners in the eye when they shot her.

“I grew up with Hannah Senesh as a symbol of Jewish courage,” she said. There were not many books on Senesh at the renowned London library, however. “So, I simply ordered whatever they had. I picked up my stack of books and noticed that one of them was a bit unusual. It was an old book with yellowing pages bound in a worn blue fabric with gold letters and it was in Yiddish.”

Batalion speaks Yiddish, in addition to English, French and Hebrew.

“I flipped through these 200 pages looking for Hannah Senesh, but she was only in the last 10. In front of her [were] dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, mainly from the ghettos in Poland.”

The stories featured guns, grenades, espionage. “This was a Yiddish thriller,” she said.

As Batalion soon discovered, it was young Jewish women who were disproportionately represented in some of the most daring acts of resistance of the time.

“These ghetto girls hid revolvers in teddy bears, built elaborate underground bunkers, flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine and whiskey and shot them,” she said. “They planned uprisings, carried out intelligence missions and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children, they organized soup kitchens, underground schools and printing presses. They flung Molotov cocktails in ghetto uprisings and blew up Nazi supply trains.

“I had never read anything like this,” said Batalion. “I was astonished and equally baffled. Who were these women? What made them act as they did? Aside from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which I’d heard of, what was the story of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust?… And why had I, who grew up in a survivor family and community, who was so involved in Jewish arts and culture – I even have a PhD in women’s history – how had I never heard this story?”

Thus began a dozen years of research in Poland, Israel, England and across North America, in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos, she said. “I trod through testimonies, letters, photographs, obscure documentaries and the towns where these heroines were born and raised,” she said.

“Reading through all this material, I was astonished to learn of the scope of the underground,” she said. “Over 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units … 30,000 Jews enlisted in the partisans. Rescue networks supported 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. Uprisings occurred in ghettos, in labour camps and death camps, all this alongside daily acts of resilience – smuggling food, making art, hiding, hugging a barrack-mate to keep her warm, even telling jokes during transports to relieve fear. Women were at the helm of so many of these personal and organized efforts, women aged 16 to 25. Hundreds of them, possibly even thousands of them.”

The ability to do such things, under unimaginably dangerous conditions, was aided by a social phenomenon that predated the Nazi occupation.

The early 20th century in Poland was a time of extraordinary Jewish intellectual ferment. Making up about 10% of the country’s population, Jews had a profound social infrastructure, including 180 Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw alone. Jewish political movements proliferated – left, right, religious, secular, Zionist and non-Zionist – creating a vibrant discourse and networks of interrelated groups across the country. By the 1930s, almost all Polish Jews were wondering if this was a country where they could continue to thrive, whether they belonged to the country where their ancestors had lived for 1,000 years.

“As part of this identity struggle, 100,000 young Jews were members of Jewish youth movements – that’s a huge proportion,” said Batalion. “These were values-driven groups that were affiliated with these varying political parties and stances.”

For example, when war broke out, Frumka Plotnicka was 24 years old. Her youth movement urged their members to flee east – “That’s also how my grandparents survived,” noted Batalion – but fleeing a crisis did not suit Plotnicka.

“Stunning her comrades in her movement, she was the first to smuggle herself back into Nazi-occupied Poland,” she said. “She went to Warsaw and became a leader in the Warsaw Ghetto. She ran soup kitchens for hundreds of Jews, she organized classes, discussions and performances. She negotiated with German, Polish and Jewish councils, she helped extract Jews from forced labour.

“She covered her Jewish features with a kerchief and makeup and left the ghetto, traveling across Poland, keeping communities connected. She brought with her information, inspiration and books,” Batalion said. “They had a secret printing press. She ran seminars across Nazi-occupied Poland.

“In late 1941, the youth movements acknowledged the truth of the Nazis’ genocidal plans and they transformed from education hubs into these underground militias. Frumka still traveled to disseminate information. Now, it was about mass executions. She was one of the first to smuggle weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto. She had two guns in a sack of potatoes.”

She was killed while firing at Nazis from a bunker in 1943.

While disguised as non-Jews, some of the woman warriors were able to exploit the prejudices of their tormentors.

“Nazi culture was classically sexist,” said Batalion. “They never suspected that a sweet-looking girl had a pocket full of ammunition. Jewish women played to this underestimation. One courier … was once carrying a valise full of contraband material and she was getting on a train and noticed they were checking bags. She was very beautiful and bashed her eyelashes and went up to the Gestapo man and said, ‘My bag is so heavy, can you carry it for me?’ He was being chivalrous, ‘Of course, I’ll carry it for you,’ and he took it on the train for her and, of course, they didn’t check the bag.”

These young Jewish fighters had lost everything and still soldiered on, the author said.

“They knew they wouldn’t topple the German army, yet risked their lives time and time again to fight for justice and liberty,” she said. “Small victories are achievable and necessary for great change. It is through these young women that I learned that not only is trauma passed through generations of Jewish women but so is courage and daring, strength and resilience, passion and compassion.”

Batalion’s book won the 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Holocaust category and has been optioned for a Steven Spielberg film, for which Batalion is working on the screenplay.

The annual Kristallnacht commemorative lecture is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel, with support from the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment of the VHEC, and funded through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.

Prior to the keynote address, Holocaust survivors lit candles in their homes. Kennedy Stewart, mayor of Vancouver, offered reflections and Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, read a proclamation from the city. Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker.