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Tag: Amalia Boe-Fishman

“Never again” still resonates?

“Never again” still resonates?

Left to right: Mia Givon, Lorenzo Tesler-Mabe, Kat Palmer and Erin Aberle-Palm. (screenshot from Kat Palmer)

Holocaust survivors and their descendants were joined by top elected officials and Jewish community leaders in a series of commemorations marking Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, across Canada last week.

In Vancouver, community members gathered together at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver April 27, while scores more watched remotely as the traditional in-person ceremony returned for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.

Marcus Brandt, vice-president of the presenting organization, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, welcomed guests and invited Holocaust survivors to light Yahrzeit candles.

“On Yom Hashoah, we join as a community to remember the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany and its co-conspirators between 1933 and 1945,” he said. “It is also a day to pay tribute to the Jewish resistance that took place during the Holocaust.”

This year marks the 79th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which is the most notable of many acts of Jewish resistance to Nazism.

Marsha Lederman, a journalist who is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, spoke of the importance of telling our stories.

“When I was growing up,” she said, “the Holocaust was everywhere and nowhere. As far back as I can remember, there were hints and references. My parents talked about things happening in camp. What was this camp? I knew it wasn’t like the summer camp that I went to. I knew a lot of their friends were also at these camps, but I didn’t know the details.”

At the age of 5, Marsha met a new friend whose home was filled with laughter and extended family.

“One day, when I came home from a visit at my friend’s house, I asked my mother what was really a simple, innocent question,” said Lederman. “She has grandparents, why don’t I? My poor mother. She was caught off guard and her answer was truly horrifying – at least as I remember it, because I know memory is very faulty. But, as I recall, she said I didn’t have grandparents because the Germans hated Jews and they killed them by making them take gas showers.”

This response raised more questions than answers for the young girl, not least of which was: “What did we do to make the Germans hate us so much and do they still hate us? It was a horrible introduction to the details of the tragedy of my family and it taught me another terrible lesson: be careful about asking questions because the answers could be murder.”

As a result, much of Lederman’s Holocaust education was gained “through osmosis, rather than sitting down and asking questions,” she said.

Her father died when Lederman was a young woman and, in a tragic turn of events, her mother died just as Lederman had bought a ticket to visit her in Florida, armed with a recorder to finally ask the questions she had hesitated to broach in earlier years.

“It’s taken me years to try to figure out what I could have learned in an afternoon at my mother’s kitchen table,” she said. “I have no way of knowing these things because I didn’t ask. We need to ask and we need to tell.”

Lederman explores these questions in a book being released this month, titled Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed.

Amalia Boe-Fishman (née de Leeuw) was the featured survivor speaker at the Vancouver event. Born in the Netherlands, she was less than a year old when the Germans invaded her country. Her grandparents were soon transported to Auschwitz and murdered.

In what is an extremely rare phenomenon, Amalia, her parents and her brother all survived the war years because a Dutch Christian resistance fighter, Jan Spiekhout, and his family hid members of the de Leeuw family in a variety of hiding places over the course of years. Amalia’s mother even gave birth to another child in 1944. (That child, as well as Boe-Fishman’s oldest son, are both named Jan in honour of their rescuer.) Their survival was a statistical miracle. The Netherlands had among the lowest Jewish survival rate of any country during the Holocaust. Of 140,000 Dutch Jews in 1939, only 38,000 were alive in 1945.

Boe-Fishman recalled the day Canadian forces liberated the Netherlands – it was one of the only times in three years that she had set foot outdoors.

“It was strange and frightening outside and close to so many strangers,” she said. “The Canadian soldiers came rolling in on their tanks, handing out chocolates, everyone smiling, dancing, waving Dutch flags. Then I was told I could go home to my real family. But who were these strangers? I did not want to leave the family Spiekhout. They were my family. After all, I had not seen my real family for three years.”

In 1961, she traveled to Israel to meet members of her family who had made aliyah before the war and to reconnect with her Jewish identity. There, on the kibbutz she was staying, she met a Canadian, whom she married and they subsequently moved to Vancouver and had three children.

In 2009, Boe-Fishman and her three sons traveled to The Hague for the investiture of Jan Spiekhout and his late parents, Durk and Froukje Spiekhout, as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

“To be together with my children, my brother, and the grown children of the Spiekhout family, this was such a moving event in our lives,” she said.

As part of the Vancouver ceremony, Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung read a proclamation from the City of Vancouver. Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim. Lorenzo Tesler-Mabe, Mia Givon and Kat Palmer, members of the third generation, as well as Erin Aberle-Palm, sang and read poetry, accompanied by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra violinist Andrew James Brown and pianist Wendy Bross Stuart, who was also music director of the program.

The following day, a hybrid in-person and virtual event was held at the British Columbia legislature, featuring Premier John Horgan.

“On Yom Hashoah, we are challenged to ensure the words ‘never again’ are supported by action,” he said. “Over the past few years, there has been an increase in antisemitism in B.C., and the Jewish community is one of the most frequently targeted groups in police-reported hate crimes. That’s why our government will continue working to address racism and discrimination in all its forms.… Today, as we remember and honour those who were lost and those who survived, we must recommit to building a more just and inclusive province, where everyone is safe and the horrors of the past are never repeated.”

Michael Lee, member of the legislature for Vancouver-Langara, spoke on behalf of the B.C. Liberal caucus.

“Every year, we commemorate this day and remember the heroes and the Righteous Among Nations who stood up to oppose the most vile, hateful oppression,” Lee said. “We recognize the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, we make a solemn promise to never forget and never again allow such horrific actions to take place. This is a responsibility that we all must carry with us not only today but every day. It is a responsibility we must be better at upholding, as soldiers at this very moment commit war crimes once again in Europe. We have not done enough. Right here in Canada, we see another year of record rises in antisemitism. We have to do better.”

Lee called on the province to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism.

MLA Adam Olsen represented the Green party.

“While time distances us from the horrific events, the memories and the stories remain steadfast in our mind and are carried and passed from one generation to the next,” said Olsen. “The Holocaust was an ultimate form of evil, persecution, oppression, genocide, complete disregard for human life, pushed to the most appalling degree…. The Holocaust is a stark reminder of the darkness, the wickedness, that can exist among us. However, it is also important to acknowledge that this is a story of strength, resilience and humanity and, to that, I raise my hands to all of the survivors, the Jewish community, that have ensured that the world knows and hears the stories. As difficult as it is to continue sharing them, we cannot stop hearing them or else we will fall victim to thinking that we have passed that now.”

Rabbi Harry Brechner of Congregation Emanu-El lamented the deaths of Holocaust survivors in the current war in Ukraine, “who died when they were cold, again, and hungry, again, and who died in the face of violence.”

“That never should happen and we all know that,” the rabbi said. “I don’t know how to make those big changes. I’m not a world leader. I’m the leader of a small congregation. But I think we are all leaders of our hearts and if each of us can make that difference, it’s got to have a huge ripple effect.”

Holocaust survivor Leo Vogel said that history records the end of the Holocaust in 1945. “But, for the people who lived through it and survived that horrible blight of human history, for them, 1945 is not when the Holocaust ended,” he said. “It continues to this very day to live in memories and nightmares and ongoing health problems.… The fascist attempt to eradicate the Jewish people must never be forgotten. The memory of the tortured and murdered cannot be shoveled underground as the Nazis did with the ashes. As children in the Holocaust, we were the youngest and, now, in our older years, we are at the tail end of those who can still bear witness.”

Vogel spoke of the unfathomable choice his parents made to hand him over, as a child, to a Christian family for hiding.

“Not long after that deeply painful decision to separate me from them, they were deported to Auschwitz and there they were murdered without ever knowing whether their desperate act to allow me to go into hiding saved my life,” he said. “I get cold chills when I think of the intense agony they went through in making their decision. It would have been their hope, I’m sure, that one day we would once again get together. That day never happened. Their pain must have been overwhelming. Many times, I have wondered what they said to each other and to me the night before they gave me away and, countless times, I have asked myself whether I would have had the strength to do an equal act when my children were young.”

In Ottawa, earlier on April 27, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau touted his government’s steps in fighting antisemitism, including the creation of a special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, currently held by Irwin Cotler, and proposed legislation to make denying or diminishing the Holocaust a criminal offence.

“Earlier this year, our country and people around the world were shocked and dismayed to see Nazi imagery displayed in our nation’s capital,” the prime minister said, referring to trucker protests in Ottawa. “For the Jewish community, and for all communities, those images were deeply disturbing. Sadly, this wasn’t a standalone instance. Jewish people are encountering threats and violence more and more both online and in person. This troubling resurgence of antisemitism cannot and will not be ignored. The atrocities of the Holocaust cannot be buried in history.… We must make sure that ‘never again’ truly means never again.”

Shimon Koffler Fogel, chief executive officer of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, picked up on that theme, noting that the term “never again” was “born out of the Jewish experience but was always intended to be universal in its application.”

“How can we witness the atrocities visited on the Rohingya, the Uighurs or the Yazidi and claim the cry of ‘never again’ has meaning?” he asked. “How can we observe the unvarnished aggression against Ukraine and assert we have taken the lessons of the Holocaust to heart?”

He said he derives hope from the fact that Canada seems to have learned the lesson of the MS St. Louis, the ship filled with Jewish refugees that was turned away from Canada and other safe havens in 1939. Now, Canada is a place, he said, “where fleeing Syrian and Iraqi refugees can rebuild their lives, where Afghani women and girls can fulfil their dreams, where displaced, wartorn Ukrainians can find safe harbour.”

“I take great pride that Canada is so committed to Holocaust remembrance and education,” said Michael Levitt, president and chief executive officer of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, “A major reason is because of the survivors who, after suffering unthinkable adversity in Europe, rebuilt their shattered lives here, in our great country. Their strength, resilience and willingness to share their deeply personal and harrowing stories have been a gift and a source of inspiration to all Canadians.”

Dr. Agnes Klein, a Holocaust survivor, spoke of her family’s wartime experiences. Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Ronen Hoffman, commended Canada on adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism.

A day earlier, at another virtual commemoration from the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Holocaust survivor Max Smart told of his family’s harrowing Holocaust experiences.

Paul Hirschson, consul general of Israel in Montreal, compared the loss of Jewish life, with its incalculable loss of talent, in the Holocaust with the explosion of Jewish talent taking place in this century.

“Jewish talent lost was one of history’s greatest tragedies,” said the diplomat. “The talent emerging is perhaps the most exciting story of the 21st century…. Antisemitism is still widespread, also here in Canada. Montreal, where many survivors found a home, is no exception. We will defeat hate every time. Hatred will never again rob the world of Jewish talent.”

Format ImagePosted on May 6, 2022May 4, 2022Author Pat JohnsonCategories Celebrating the Holidays, NationalTags Adam Olsen, Amalia Boe-Fishman, antisemitism, CIJA, Harry Brechner, Holocaust, John Horgan, Leo Vogel, Marcus Brandt, Marsha Lederman, Michael Lee, Montreal, Ottawa, remembrance, survivor, SWC, Vancouver, VHEC, Victoria, Yom Hashoah
Survivors reflect on liberation

Survivors reflect on liberation

Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar moderates a panel with Holocaust survivors, left to right, Janos Benisz, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Dr. Peter Suedfeld and Alex Buckman. (photo by Pat Johnson)

One survivor of the Holocaust who spoke at a panel recently believes that, in a generation or two, people will largely forget about the catastrophic events of that time.

“I think the world will forget about Auschwitz,” said Dr. Peter Suedfeld, a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “The world has already forgotten about ‘never again.’ We’ve had a fair number of genocides since 1945, in which the world did not intervene. A recent poll that I saw … apparently, the proportion of people who remember anything about how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what Auschwitz was, what the Holocaust was and so on, is not all that much above 50%.

“This is going to go on generation after generation,” he continued. “The survivors won’t be here to push the story any further. Their children will for awhile, but they have other things to do and other things to be concerned about and their children even more so. In a few more generations, it will be in the history books and people will say, yeah, I read about that or thought about that in grade whatever but, in terms of remembering it as something in your gut, something that arouses an emotion, something that has a personal connection to you, I don’t think it’s going to last all that much longer. I’m sorry to say that, but that’s what I think.”

Suedfeld, who weeks earlier was invested into the Order of Canada for his decades of work on the psychological and physical effects of extreme and challenging environments, was speaking at Hillel House, on the UBC campus, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27. He was part of a panel of four survivors sharing their reflections 75 years after liberation.

Suedfeld, who was born in Hungary, survived under false papers and a back story as an orphaned Roman Catholic child. He recalled successive bombardments of the various sanctuaries he was in near the end of the war, as Allied bombers repeatedly blew buildings apart while Suedfeld and other children hid in the cellars.

After liberation by Russian forces, Suedfeld was eventually reunited with his father; his mother had been murdered. The lesson he took from the experience, he told the packed afternoon audience, was to cherish and defend the values of freedom.

“Freedom to be who you really are, but freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of everything,” he said. After moving to the United States, Suedfeld became a powerful advocate of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion and expression. Since coming to Canada, he has been a similar champion of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he said.

Suedfeld’s admittedly pessimistic perspective on the future of Holocaust remembrance was contested by Alex Buckman, a fellow survivor on the panel.

As long as organizations exist like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which co-sponsored the event with Hillel BC, and children of survivors and others who have been touched by their experiences share the lessons they have learned, the future will be better, he said.

“Maybe our children will pick up, speaking on our behalf,” said Buckman. “Maybe they will remember because we will tell them what happened.”

Like Suedfeld, Buckman survived by being hidden by Catholics; in his case, in Belgium.

“They told us that the war was over and that we should rejoice and be happy and our parents would come and pick us up and everything would be hunky-dory,” he recalled. “At 6-and-a-half in an orphanage, nothing was that rosy. We saw parents come and pick up their children and take them home, but nobody came for us. I was there with my sister Annie and she was crying and wondering why our parents weren’t coming and I tried to tell her that I’m sure that they will come. But, like her, I didn’t know why they weren’t coming.”

The pair were moved back to Brussels and put in the care of the Red Cross, which posted the names of orphaned and unclaimed children on sheets around the city. Eventually, a paternal uncle showed up and took the two children to Annie’s parents – who, since little Alex had believed himself to be Annie’s brother, he reasonably concluded were also his parents. The truth came out in a cruel way, when another cousin, in a pique of anger, blurted out to Alex that his parents were dead and that Annie’s parents were not his.

“I took a step back and, for the first time, I realized I was alone,” Buckman recalled. His aunt and uncle did care for him, though, despite the uncle’s misgivings, because of the aunt’s insistence based on a promise she made to the heavens when she learned of her sister’s death.

Also on the panel was Amalia Boe-Fishman, who was born in the northern Netherlands in 1939 and also survived thanks to a Christian family. Like many survivors, her liberation story is not one of joyous freedom but of confusion and fear of the future.

“Liberation should have been a real happy time for me. It wasn’t,” she said. “I was told we were free, but what did that mean? What did that mean to a frightened 5-year-old girl who had been in hiding for three years? What did it mean to be free? I was told that, for the first time I could remember … I would now be able to go outdoors. I didn’t know what to expect. What was there? What was waiting for me outdoors? Indoors had become my entire life. Indoors was where I felt secure and safe. Indoors was all I knew.”

Her first venture out was harrowing. It was odd enough to be surrounded by throngs of strangers after her entire life had been confined to just a few familiar faces. After a victory parade, the girls she knew as her “sisters” decided to walk to the town centre. While crossing a bridge with scores of others – Amalia had never seen a bridge before – a rumour started that the Nazis had returned and panic swept the crowd. Pushing and shoving was accompanied by screaming and concern that the bridge was about to collapse.

“Here I was, trapped outdoors, in a crowd of panicked strangers and I was terrified,” she said. “The bridge didn’t collapse, but, as you can imagine [it was] a very long time before I would ever cross a bridge again.”

Another ostensibly joyous aspect of liberation was also clouded with confusion and fear.

“I was told that I had a real family. I had a real father, a real mother, an older brother and a baby brother,” said Boe-Fishman. “Miraculously, out of many different hiding places, all four of them had survived the war.… But who were these people? They were strangers. So, this is what liberation means to me. To leave the only family I ever had known to go outdoors to a place of terrified strangers, to strange people in a strange home.… I had to adapt to a new and also frightening world.”

For Janos Benisz, liberation was similarly conflicted. As a child, he had seen his father and his grandmother dead in the streets. His mother had been killed earlier by Nazi collaborators, during what was to have been a routine medical procedure.

Young Janos was transported from his hometown of Esztergom, Hungary, to Budapest, where Jews were divided up, many being sent directly to death camps including Auschwitz.

“I ended up in an Austrian slave labour camp,” he said, remaining there for seven or eight months before the Russians liberated them.

“I had the body of a 4-year-old,” he recalled. “At my bar mitzvah, I was under five feet.”

Making his way back to his hometown, he found squatters in the family’s house and learned that, of his immediate family of eight uncles, two aunts and 29 cousins, only Janos and one uncle had survived the Nazis.

Benisz was put in a Jewish orphanage in Budapest, then sent to Halifax, where he was put on a train to Winnipeg. He was bounced from foster home to foster home, back to an orphanage and then to a reformatory.

“I couldn’t fit in,” he said. At 18, he got a job at the Winnipeg Free Press as a copy boy.

“I spent the next 15 years in the newspaper business, then I became a salesman on my own, retired in ’71,” he said. He noted the figurative and literal centrality of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in his life today. He lives 40 yards from the centre, he said, and much of his social life is focused there.

“It’s my second home,” he said. “I work out there. I shmooze there. I’ve got a group of guys I call the ‘kosher nostra.’ I’m very happy. I absolutely adore this country of Canada. It’s been good to me ever since I turned 18.”

Prior to the panel, Holocaust survivors lit candles of remembrance. Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart read a proclamation declaring International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city. Rob Fleming, British Columbia’s minister of education, spoke on the importance of Holocaust education and credited the partnership of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). Student Adam Dobrer shared his family’s Holocaust legacy. Prof. Nancy Hermiston, director of voice and opera at the University of British Columbia, provided opening remarks. Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, introduced the program and spoke of the importance of remembrance and the power of the memory of Auschwitz on the 75th anniversary of its liberation. Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator of the VHEC, moderated the panel. Rabbi Philip Bregman, chaplain of Hillel BC, chanted El Maleh Rachamim and the Mourners’ Kaddish.

Many other commemorations and events took place throughout the province on and around Jan. 27.

Format ImagePosted on February 14, 2020February 12, 2020Author Pat JohnsonCategories LocalTags Alex Buckman, Amalia Boe-Fishman, commemoration, Holocaust, Janos Benisz, Peter Suedfeld, VHEC
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