Azrieli Foundation

Shoah survivor offers a warning

Judy Weissenberg Cohen, at the age of 92, recently published her memoir, Cry in Unison. (photo from Riddle Films)

On erev Yom Kippur, in a Nazi concentration camp, a group of Hungarian Jewish women and girls prevailed upon two comparatively sympathetic kapos to obtain a lone candle and a single siddur.

Judy Weissenberg Cohen, a Toronto woman who, at the age of 92, recently published her memoir, was one of those girls.

“In this place, where we felt that instead of asking for forgiveness from God, God should be asking for forgiveness from us, we all wanted to gather around the woman with the lit candle and siddur,” she said during a virtual book launch Sept. 14. “She began to recite the Kol Nidre very slowly so we could repeat the words if we wanted to, but we didn’t. Instead, all the women burst out in a cry in unison. Our prayer was the sound of this incredible cry of hundreds of women. I have never heard, before or since then, such a heart-rending sound. Something was happening to us. It was as if our hearts were bursting. Even though no one really believed the prayer would change our situation, that God would suddenly intervene – we weren’t that naïve – the opportunity to cry out and remember together reminded us of our former lives, alleviating utter misery even for the shortest while. In some inexplicable way, it seemed to give us comfort. Even today, many decades later, every time I go to Kol Nidre services, I can’t shake the memory of that sound. This is the Kol Nidre I always remember.”

Cohen’s book, Cry in Unison, was published by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. Cohen’s is the 113th memoir published by the program. The books are offered to schools and universities across Canada at no cost, providing educators with an accessible entryway to teaching about the Holocaust by approaching history one story at a time.

Cohen was born in 1928, the youngest of seven children in the Weissenberg family.

In 1938, when she was 10 years old, her parents and other Hungarian Jews became increasingly alarmed by news from adjacent countries, including the Anschluss of Austria, followed a few months later by Kristallnacht.

When the mass transport of Jews from Hungary began, in 1944, Cohen spent days in a boxcar with 78 others, with two buckets – one for drinking water, the other for a toilet. On arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as they disembarked from the cattle cars, a worker approached women with children and “very quietly in an urgent tone” told the young mothers to hand their children over to the grandmothers.

“At the time, we didn’t know what it meant,” Cohen recalled. “The fact was [the worker] asked the young mothers to give children over to the grandmothers because he knew that, within hours of our arrival, the grandmothers who looked 45 years or older and Jewish children 14 and younger immediately will be murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. He wanted to save the young mothers. If you didn’t carry a child, then you lived. If you carried a child, even if the child wasn’t yours, you went to the gas chamber with the child.”

Cohen and her sisters were showered, shaved and given dirty hand-me-down garments. Sent outside without towels to dry themselves, Cohen could not locate her sisters.

“Only when they started to talk … and all of a sudden we started to laugh in our painful way,” she recalled. “How drastically we changed within a few hours.”

Cohen was subsequently transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then to a forced labour facility that was a sub-camp of Buchenwald.

In the spring of 1945, on a death march through the German countryside, she was finally liberated. The realization came in a German man’s choice of language.

With other girls and women, Cohen was sleeping in a barn during the march. “In the morning, there was a loud knock on the barn door,” she said. “We woke up all of a sudden from our shallow sleep and there stood a guy in the doorway. I still remember, it was a beautiful sunny day, the sun was behind him and he stood there like a dark silhouette. And, in a nice, strong voice in German, he said, ‘Fräuleins!’”

The women were startled as much by the word as by the awakening.

“Did he really say Fräuleins? A German addressed us as Fräuleins?” they asked one another, “The war must be over. A German hasn’t addressed us in a civil tongue for ages.”

He immediately continued: “Fräuleins, you are free.”

The terms liberation and freedom may be equivocal given what Holocaust survivors experienced. In Cohen’s case, she returned to her hometown in Hungary, certain that if she, the youngest, had survived, then surely her elders, who were more capable of caring for themselves, would likewise be coming home.

“I don’t know why I dared to be logical about the Nazi genocide,” she said.

Instead, she was reunited with one brother, one sister and two cousins.

“So it was very traumatic,” she said. The trauma was accentuated by the fact that some of the returning villagers had been on work battalions and had not experienced the death camps, and in fact had no knowledge of them.

“I had to be the messenger to tell them that their wives and their little girls were murdered in the gas chambers in Birkenau,” she said. “They didn’t believe me. They actually [considered] me insane.”

She went to a displaced persons camp – constructed on the grounds of the razed Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – and lived there for two years, learning a trade. But, when the opportunity came to emigrate, it wasn’t as a dental technician that she was chosen.

The Canadian government was seeking 2,500 garment workers. Though she had no experience, Cohen faked it and came to Montreal ostensibly as seamstress. (She moved with her family to Toronto in 1961.)

“But, with all other difficulties that we overcame through the time, I finally learned, with kind helping people, how to put together a dress and made some kind of a living,” she said. “The contract was only for one year, but I stayed for three years.… During those three years, I also prepared myself to change skills, change profession. I learned French, I learned English, I took a course to become a bookkeeper with typing ability and switch to office work.”

There was no psychological support and the term post-traumatic stress disorder did not yet exist.

“I don’t think we realized that we were traumatized,” she said. “You went through difficult times but it didn’t have a name. It so happened that my sister and I, and my brother, we had self-help among ourselves…. The emotional baggage, as far as I’m concerned, and I can only speak for myself, that had to be put on the back burner. It no longer was a priority to talk about it. Furthermore, nobody wanted to listen to us…. We just went on living as new Canadians and establishing new lives basically on the ashes of the old, and even became happy Canadians, got married, had children. We became like all other Canadians, overcoming all emotional difficulties by not giving them eminence in our lives.”

Cohen became a public speaker, sharing her Holocaust experiences with schools and other audiences after she had a run-in with neo-Nazis in downtown Toronto. She also has become a researcher and author on the topic of the unique experiences of women in the Holocaust.

Above all, Cohen said, she wrote her memoir in the 10th decade of her life as a warning.

“Mainly, I would like you to understand that this generation and subsequent generations must learn from us while we are still alive that this kind of depravity, one human to another, was possible and did happen and, unfortunately, it could happen again,” she said. “We are writing it to you all as a warning, as a very serious warning of what can happen even in cultured, educated, civil societies.”

The value of memoirs

This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and the Azrieli Foundation. Last fall, students learned about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students began interviewing local Holocaust survivors and are now in the process of writing the survivors’ memoirs, based on the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. They used their most recent journal entry to reflect on the topic of The Importance of Memoirs. Here are two excerpts.

Memories are our experiences: our interactions with people we love or hate, our communication with the ever-changing world. Our memories remind us of our moral values, our knowledge, our appreciation of our own lives, and perhaps our own inadequacy in being the person that we wanted to be. Our memories are a true reflection of who we are, and that is exactly why they are our most valuable asset.

Writing down our memories is a great way to retain them and, hence, it is meaningful to write a memoir on behalf of David, a man who has experienced one of the most controversial and complex events in history – the Holocaust – so that his memories will be retained in concrete form and can be passed on to many generations. I believe David’s descendants, and anyone who cares about other human beings, will be inspired by what David fought for in the past and will be grateful for what they have. Sometimes, we take food and safety, peace and dignity, the privilege to love and to be loved, for granted, and we forget about the unfortunate ones.

Most importantly, memoirs of Holocaust survivors are a stern reminder of the fact that we humans can turn into perpetrators for not so obvious reasons. It would be wrong for us to think that, since we are civilized, rational, educated people, we cannot become perpetrators. We have come to realize that it is not the case that only psychotic or inherently evil people can harm others in callous and appalling ways. The Holocaust has demonstrated that hatred, racism, conflicts between religions and a sense of insecurity can easily be used to justify our wrongdoings. With the real-life experiences of survivors recorded in memoirs, hopefully people will never forget this painful lesson in human history.

– Bonnie Pun

Storytelling is a phenomenon that all manners of societies and cultures have practised since the hominid species first learned to communicate. We use stories to convey social values and wisdom. In Western society, thanks to pioneers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, storytelling forms the bedrock of modern counseling practice. The intimacy of sharing a story with a compassionate and safe person can literally transform a life. Stories transmit meaning, both individually and socially. It’s as simple and complex as that.

Memoirs are a place where individuals can encounter and transform their experience into one that has larger meaning. On a societal level, projects like Writing Lives present the human experience and personal costs of the atrocities that have occurred. The personal narrative transforms historical facts into real and impactful events that can be felt, if not fully understood.

The Holocaust is so often constructed and taught as an historical anomaly, a mysterious evil; however, the fact of the matter is that it is a story of social relationships. Sadly, “stories” such as this have occurred far too frequently over the last 70 years. Globally, we have seen genocidal processes of hate in countries such as former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Russia, Sudan … the list goes on. As our neighbour to the south, the United States, struggles with an ideological divide that has become so significant it is now one of the countries monitored by the NGO Genocide Watch, memoirs from the Holocaust become particularly important here in the Western world. I think it is sometimes easy to look at racially motivated brutality in the second and third worlds and feel a certain sense of safety. These memoirs confront us with a different reality, one which is too important to ignore.

– Ann Thomas

Class leads to understanding

This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. Last fall, students learned about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students began interviewing local Holocaust survivors and are now in the process of writing the survivors’ memoirs, based on the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. They used their most recent journal entry to reflect on the topic of Multicultural Perspectives. Here are a few excerpts.

It’s been more than half a year since I decided to join the Writing Lives program. The historical context should have been enough motivation for me to join when I first heard of the program about a year ago, but I hesitated. I’d never done a writing project as large or as important as this. I felt that my skills and experience were inadequate in preserving the stories of Holocaust survivors. I still feel that way.

As a child and then later, as a student of history, I regarded my sources as just that: sources. The stories I listened to were filtered, edited for a younger audience. The books and films I read and watched were similarly altered. As I delved into the history and historiography of it all, I had an inkling in the back of my mind that people actually lived through these events, experienced them. But the moment our survivor partner started telling his story, it really struck me that yes, this is real, these are real people.

This project isn’t just a curiosity, an interest – it has become more of a duty. It has been mentioned many times since the program started that it is crucial for these stories to be told, written down and passed on, for time is running out. I never felt the gravity of that responsibility until we heard the history from someone who saw it with his own eyes.

– J.V. Malabrigo

***

Courses like Writing Lives are a reminder of the damage complacency can cause. Without knowledge, without tolerance, we are doomed to walk in circles until our hatred ends our capacity to recognize each other as human beings. We will fail to recognize that we all bleed, cry, laugh and need each other to survive.

I have learned the beauty of a human story. I have learned what it truly means to be triumphant and what it means to be a survivor. I am learning what it means to achieve true greatness and compassion, despite the lack of it that is shown to so many. I have explored the reality of how complacency may be our true enemy. I have learned that ignorance and acceptance of extremism means turning off our humanity and letting hatred rule minds and hearts alike.

We see history as ancient stories…. Through this class, I understand how to immortalize living, breathing history and to show a history of peace and love coming out of trauma and violence.

– Heather Parks

***

The Writing Lives program has had a significant impact on me. I hope to become an elementary school teacher, specifically teaching a primary grade (kindergarten to Grade 3). Holocaust education may be out of my hands in terms of the curriculum, but there is a major, never-ending lesson that I take away from this experience. I hope to teach my students the importance of embracing and celebrating our differences.

When someone looks different from us, celebrates different holidays, eats different food – whatever the case may be – these are opportunities to learn and to love. If there are things we notice about each other that we don’t understand, there are ways to respectfully ask questions. We will always have differences of views and opinions, but the most important thing to remember is that no single person’s opinion is “proper” or more important than anyone else’s. Our differences make us unique. Our differences are what make the world such an amazing place. If we remember the importance of respect and understanding, we can ensure that we will never see another Holocaust.

– Chelsea Riva

***

My father is Chinese South African. Born in 1965 in Johannesburg, South Africa, he grew up in the final stages of apartheid. This racist system denied people of colour, namely black people, basic human rights and dignity. Laws were based on the race or colour of a person and, while laws were well-defined for most ethnic groups, Chinese people in South Africa were such a small minority that most of their daily lives fell into a legal grey area. In this system, Chinese people were above black people, below white people. Chinese people in some cases would be allowed into white institutions but could be refused service at the discretion of the owner. While Chinese people were given certain privileges, at the end of the day, my family was denied the full rights of humanity. They had to carry identification cards, they were victims of racism and their lives were constructed in fear of punishment from a racist system whose punishment was seemingly random.

My mother is Japanese. Born in 1965 in Hiroshima, Japan, she grew up in a conservative society that often refuses to talk about its violent history of invasion, colonialism and war. This is not to say that my mother herself denies this history, but, in general, Japanese people become uncomfortable when discussing the role of Japan as an invading force in Asia. Numerous Japanese war crimes remain unacknowledged to this day, and even those that have been acknowledged have never reached the same global recognition as the crimes of the Holocaust.

It is unfair to compare separate instances of invasion, imprisonment or murder. The discrimination my father experienced was distinctive and had similarities to the Holocaust, but by no means was it the same. The invading history of my mother’s homeland was horrific, but to compare the actions of the Japanese army and government to those of the Nazis dilutes the complicated issues of Japanese society while disrespecting the unique experience of those terrorized by the Japanese. However, it was with knowledge of these two sides of my family, both Chinese and Japanese, that I took this class.

Taking this class did not change my perspective of the Holocaust. Instead, the Holocaust became more real, more detailed. I came to this class with the utmost respect for what we were studying and with an intense desire to do something that “mattered,” which is a common goal for many people my age. What I didn’t expect was to form such a personal connection with our survivor. I didn’t expect for it to become so real that I would break down crying.

My experience in this class has been enriching in ways that I didn’t expect. I don’t think that I can say this class changed me, but it deepened the ideas of legacy that I held because of my background, and it helped personalize the Holocaust. My family’s history helped me form a deep respect for my elders. Because of them, I learned that there is power in the retelling of stories told with fear, shame and beauty. I have family that comes from the side of both the oppressed and the oppressors, and this informed my perspective and my need to take this class.

– Yukiko Takahashi-Laisut

Reflections on first meeting

This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. Last fall, students learned about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students began interviewing local Holocaust survivors and will write their memoirs on the basis of the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. Students used their most recent journal entry to reflect on their first meetings with the survivor with whom they are partnered. Here are a few excerpts.

Prior to meeting our survivor partner, one of our group members spoke to him on the phone, and she described him as a person “who doesn’t let anything past him.” It seems he’d tested her on her ability to say the word “Holocaust” without shuddering an apology.

It is clear that our partner refuses to spend his time telling his story to anyone who cannot handle it. On one hand, his attitude is a comfort; I believe we will be able to show him that not only are we unafraid to hear his story, but also that we care deeply about helping him tell it authentically. On the other hand, this adds to the building anxiety about our interviews and our worries about writing the memoir. Producing a memoir that our survivor is 100% proud of is my biggest goal and also my biggest fear. I feel that telling the story of another person’s life is a tremendously huge responsibility, and I do not take it lightly.

– Chelsea Riva

We actually met D. before our first meeting: he came to our class to give a talk last semester. Our first interview was arranged at his home, and D. was as warm and friendly as before. So was his wife, and they took good care of us. They helped us with our coats and insisted that we did not have to take our shoes off. D. said we must have walked a long way, and it was the shoes that kept us walking comfortably; therefore, we should not take them off. I immediately recalled what Primo Levi wrote in his book Survival in Auschwitz. Yes, shoes are of the utmost importance, and D. has experienced that. However, we quickly realized that the house was immaculately clean, and so was the light beige carpet that we were stepping on with our shoes! Anyway, while I was worrying about the carpet, the meeting began.

– Bonnie Pun

When I first met D.S., I was apprehensive. The culmination of the past four-and-a-half months was finally at hand, and I was set to be the lead interviewer for our group – not a task that fell lightly on my shoulders.

Moira and he came into the room and she introduced him (she had met him previously). D.S. smiled so widely that his eyes crinkled, and he shook each of our hands in turn. When we were done, D.S. said a few words about himself and then quickly launched into a very compressed, detailed story about his life.

We had been expecting a more casual, getting-to-know-you first interview, and none of us had been expecting to take in such a massive amount of information – although, in hindsight, I’m glad we did. At the end of the interview, after D.S. had given us advice about meeting deadlines and making sure we had enough time to edit and rework parts of his story, we breathed a sigh of relief – it had gone well.

The opportunity to have a question-and-answer session with a person who has survived such great personal trauma is incredible. D.S. is a wonderful storyteller, and the interviews so far have been a continuously rewarding experience.

– Susan Scott

Some of the stories that D.S. shared with us at that first meeting were hard to absorb. I think I didn’t really want to understand what he was saying, as a way of protecting myself, so I wouldn’t show I was affected while I was in the room with him. It was only after I listened to the recorded interview that I could even start to imagine the events that he had endured. It sunk into me that this was a real thing that had happened to a real man, one who sat in front of me, ready to share his pain and perseverance with us. For that, I am grateful and honoured.

What D.S., the other survivors, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, the Azrieli Foundation and Langara College are doing through the Writing Lives program is so immensely important – something I have come to understand on a new level after that meeting. I think the point is to affect others in the way that this one meeting affected me. It’s to try and understand people’s suffering as best we can, though we will never feel their pain, and to use that understanding to become better people, and not be complicit in others’ suffering in the future.

– Moira Henry

Survivor’s talk inspires

“There are as many Holocaust stories as there are Holocaust survivors,” said David Ehrlich, a survivor outreach speaker of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, to open his afternoon talk at Langara College. On Oct. 31, a class of 20 students and several faculty members and guests heard Ehrlich – a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz who immigrated to Canada via Paris in the late 1940s – tell his personal story.

This class is part of a program called Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project. In the first term, its students produce research papers on prewar European Jewish communities like the one that Ehrlich called home; in the second term, they will interview survivor-partners and together write memoirs of the survivors’ experiences.

Ehrlich is an evocative speaker. He spoke lovingly of his family home in Transylvania (now part of Romania). “We had a three-room home, and we were middle-class. But we had no running water and no electricity, not for another 20 years,” he said. “Kids don’t know any better. I thought that we had it well: chicken on Friday night, bread on the table, it was wonderful!”

But he also told of his experience with antisemitic violence, the hard choices made by families who tried to avoid a Nazi roundup, and life in Auschwitz. He silenced the room when he spoke of stepping off a train boxcar at Auschwitz: “I’ll never forget the view when the sliding doors opened, or the noise that the doors made,” he said.

The students – who in this term’s research papers attempt to imaginatively reconstruct Jewish life before the Second World War’s devastation – responded with questions about Ehrlich’s journey to Canada. He spoke of the family that he made in Canada: a wife and three sons. He made his story accessible to the audience of all ages.

The students admired Ehrlich and a bond was formed during his talk, which was about an hour long. When he finished speaking, there was a respectful silence, and no student seemed willing to be the first to break it. Teachers from Langara began the question-and-answer session and, once the ice was broken, the students filled the remaining time with questions. Ehrlich in turn shared relevant wisdom for Writing Lives’ participants.

“You are educated and smart,” he told them. “There comes a time where you’ve got to learn to put up with people who are different because you have to get along. Start practising by getting along with your fellow students.”

Indeed, Writing Lives features groups in which students collaborate on research and, ultimately, on memoirs with the course’s survivor-partners. These collaborations require empathy. Ehrlich conducted himself as an exemplar of empathy, stating, “I can’t hold the grandchildren of Nazi-era Germans accountable for the Holocaust,” and the students’ response to his talk suggests that they, too, understand empathy’s importance. The course thus offers an excellent venue for students’ development of collaborative skills and of compassion. It provides a space in which students can grow closer together.

The afternoon also contained humour and reference to contemporary subjects. Ehrlich joked that he was now willing to use various German-made appliances and recalled that the heavy rainfall during a roundup of Hungarian Jews paled in comparison to Vancouver’s weather. Ehrlich also demonstrated strong knowledge of news and politics by interspersing references to American and Canadian current events into his remarks. He shared his general optimism about the post-Holocaust situation, stating, “After three or four generations, the Germans are coming clean; they are behaving like good nations do. It’s the only country in the world where you cannot say that the Holocaust didn’t exist.” He added, “We in Canada are very lucky – multicultural – and there’s no way that one minority group could be persecuted as in the Holocaust.”

His audience appreciated his graceful, optimistic tone. One enthusiastic student baked dozens of cupcakes to celebrate Ehrlich’s recent birthday.

Ehrlich’s talk will guide Writing Lives’ students through the remainder of the program. They will respond to it in one of their weekly written submissions, and the experience of interacting with a Holocaust survivor foreshadows the interviews that they will conduct in early 2018. They could not have asked for a better guide.

William Chernoff is a student in the Writing Lives program. Coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines, the two-semester program is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation.

The Holocaust in literature

This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. This fall, students are learning about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students will begin interviewing local Holocaust survivors and will write their memoirs on the basis of the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. Many students used their most recent journal entry to reflect on the value of literature in transmitting Holocaust memory. Here are a few excerpts.

The role of literature in preserving history is controversial but important. Understandably, there are people who are reluctant or even vehemently opposed to recording the Holocaust through the lens of art, concerned that the act of rewriting events in a fictional context may undermine the significance of the tragedy. Others may worry that historical inaccuracies are inevitable in these artistic works, thus doing a disservice to the victims and betraying their memories.

I would argue otherwise: that literature and historical facts can and should build upon one another, used to educate and not obscure. For me, reading our history textbook this semester has not always been easy, but reading the short story A Ghetto Dog by Isaiah Spiegel took the experience to a different level. Such is the power of narrative. As Menachem Kaiser wrote in his article “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature” (The Atlantic, Dec. 28, 2010), “literature affects us in ways that even the most brutal history cannot.” Literature makes the event close, immediate and personal. It’s hard for me to imagine being a Jew in Second World War Europe, but personal accounts and narratives come close to letting us immerse ourselves in the tragedy.

– Athina Leung

In his article “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature,” Kaiser argues that Holocaust literature is an important part of history. It can provide the emotional connection that reading facts cannot. It is a window to understand what people felt without having to experience the ordeal that the characters or author went through. Literature has the power to move the human heart. Facts are important, but they do not give the reader the ability to connect with history in ways that a more emotional and personal experience can provide.

– Tina Macaspac

I found the assigned reading, “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature,” to be incredibly relevant and thought-provoking. This article discusses the various difficulties associated with Holocaust literature, including the opinion by some historians that the only valid way to recount the Holocaust is through historical facts and memoirs. I agree that acquiring factual knowledge about the Holocaust is integral, and that reading historical documents is essential. However, I find myself disagreeing with the perspective that Holocaust literature is distasteful or discrediting to the Holocaust. Rather, literature provides an alternative, more emotional perspective that one cannot acquire from reading a fact-based history textbook. This week, for example, we read the short story A Ghetto Dog, which narrates the tale of the Jewish widow Anna and her dog Nicky. While I was aware of the facts (in this case, Jews being rounded up by Nazi troops) from a historical perspective, the story emphasized the feelings of helplessness and exhaustion that Holocaust victims and survivors felt. It touched a part of me in a way that facts and statistics could not.

– Emma Proctor

In A Ghetto Dog, the widow Anna and her dog Nicky are persecuted under the Nazi regime and forced to move into a ghetto. It is very clear from the beginning that Nicky is extremely important to Anna, and that he is her last remaining tie, not only to her deceased husband, but to her home.

The Nazis took livestock and any useful animals away from the Jewish people in order to make a profit. The livestock had value, which is why they were kept alive. People’s dogs, however, were not valuable to the Nazis, and that is one reason the dogs were killed.

Another reason was psychological. To the Nazis, it was important to wound people emotionally in order to conquer them. In the story, there were Jewish children dragging their dogs on ropes and leashes, bringing their pets, beloved family members, to be put to death. Dogs were part of a support system and, as with Anna, were reminders of home. To kill these dogs was to kill hope of return. The deaths of dogs were a stern reminder that just as easily as they could kill animals, Nazis could kill humans.

– Yukiko Takahashi-Lai

Goldman memoir is a must-read

Breakfast at Andrésy circa 1945. René Goldman is holding his bowl out for more food. The children peering through the windows are from another dining room, who had likely finished their meal but had not yet been given permission to leave. (photo from memoirs.azrielifoundation.org)

René Goldman’s account of his childhood – A Childhood Adrift (Azrieli Foundation) – is set in Belgium and France during the Second World War, when Hitler’s plan was to annihilate all European Jews. Each European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death. Only between six and 11% of European children survived the Holocaust. Ironically, this memoir describes both a heartbreaking and an uplifting story of one Jewish boy’s struggle to stay alive and sane despite all odds against him.

A Childhood Adrift is both personal and, at the same time, an important historical document. The story, written with a spatter of tongue-in-cheek humour, is a fascinating labyrinth of multiple narratives; stories within stories. It is not only about René the child, but also René the man, who revisits the past and examines the wounds left by war.

Goldman weaves his experiences throughout the periods of war and postwar, when he is a young man who travels back to the places that sheltered him and other children lost in the horror of war. The entire narrative is skilfully infused not only with historical and political facts but with the geography of various places so poignantly described one can feel and see them.

Goldman writes about the time when children lost parents, siblings and homes. These children had to depend on the kindness of strangers or were left alone to fend for themselves.

Goldman was 6 years old when the Nazis invaded his native Luxembourg, where he was born, and Belgium, where his family had taken refuge. In 1942, the family fled Belgium for France. From the last station before the French border, they walked on foot to the Demarcation Line between the German Occupied Zone and the Free Zone. No sooner did they cross the line than they were arrested by the French police, who were rounding up Jews escaping from the Occupied Zone, and the family was interned in Lons-le-Saunier. On Aug. 26, Goldman and his mother were taken to the city’s train station for deportation. His aunt appeared from nowhere and tried to take him away, but to no avail. Eventually, she found someone in authority to send two officers to rescue the young boy and save him from boarding the train. His mother was already in one of the cars waving goodbye as the train was pulling out of the station. This was the last time Goldman saw his mother. He was 8 years old.

His father disappeared that morning and it was only in 1944 that Goldman was reunited with him for a brief time, until his father was arrested and taken away. Only after the war did Goldman find out that his father died at the end of the death march from Auschwitz, in January 1945.

In 1942, Goldman was placed in the care of the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) and brought to Château du Masgelier. After two weeks, he was taken to the village of Vendoeuvres, where a young couple offered to take care of him. Soon afterward, the Free Zone was invaded by the Germans.

What followed for Goldman were moves to several homes due to the changing circumstances, which necessitated a constant search for safe places for children.

Left an orphan in 1945, Goldman was placed in the care of the CCE (Commission Centrale de l’Enfance), an organization inspired by communist ideology, which was instrumental in shaping his political beliefs. His faith in this system remained unshaken until he lived in Poland for three years, when he became disillusioned, even shocked, by it.

He writes, “I can now in all candidness recognize that I caught myself wondering whether communism was not the greatest lie of the century, if not of all time.”

Goldman’s narrative strength, among his many others, leans towards the lyrical.

One of the immediate postwar places to which Goldman was moved in France was the town of Andrésy and its Manoir de Denouval, which inspired poetic instincts in him. Here, he found the beauty of gardens and serenity, a “sanctuary” that shielded him for a time from his loneliness and the postwar chaotic reality. Interestingly, Marc Chagall, who donated funds for the children’s care, would occasionally visit the manor.

“I was enthralled with the Enchanted Manor,” writes Goldman. “It nourished in me a fascination with mystery as I explored it for hidden nooks and ventured up the narrow winding steps that led to the turret, sometimes even in the dark of night.” And, indeed, these were dark times in the young boy’s life for it was then that he realized he was an orphan.

Friendships played a huge part during the war and in the postwar period. In the boys and girls Goldman befriended along the way, and some of the kind teachers, he found a certain relief from the loneliness he felt, and from the lack of affection and support. One person who played an important role in his life was Sophie Micnic, who became his caregiver and friend. This woman, a founding leader of the MOI, the Jewish communist resistance movement in Paris and Lyon during the war, later became the director of CCE. It was she who took Goldman under her wing, and recommended that he live in the “Enchanted Manor.”

A Childhood Adrift – a must-read – is a powerful testimony of a child’s response to the calamities of war and their everlasting imprint on his life. It is also a statement of courage and survival in the face of adversity. Eventually, Goldman developed a tremendous hunger for knowledge, education and a desire for communication in as many as 10 languages.

In the last section of the book, the author reveals himself as a poet and a grown man still deeply immersed in his past.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz is a Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre outreach speaker, an award-winning author, an instructor at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Centre and the editor of the No Longer Alone section of VHEC’s Zachor, in which a longer version of this book review was originally published. René Goldman will be the keynote speaker at the community’s Kristallnacht commemoration on Nov. 5, 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel. Copies of his memoir will be distributed to those in attendance. Holocaust survivors are invited to light a memorial candle. The ceremony is presented by VHEC, Beth Israel and the Azrieli Foundation. For Pat Johnson’s review of Goldman’s book, which was initially called A Childhood on the Move, visit jewishindependent.ca/fragmented-childhood.

Students pen survivors’ memoirs

Dr. Peter Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, spoke on behalf of the survivors who participated. (photo by Jennifer Oehler)

Emotions were high at a graduation event where survivors of the Holocaust and Langara College students who wrote their memoirs shared their reflections on the experience.

Writing Lives was a two-semester course and a partnership between Langara College, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and the Azrieli Foundation. In the first semester, students learned about the history of European Jewish culture and the Holocaust. In the second term, groups of three students were teamed with a Holocaust survivor. Students interviewed the survivor, transcribed their recollections and wrote their memoirs, which were presented at the closing event April 20.

“These memoirs will be given to the survivors as gifts for themselves and their families, but they will also be archived and they may possibly be published, and they will also serve as legacies for the survivors, their families and perhaps the research community in general,” said Dr. Rachel Mines, an English instructor at Langara and coordinator of the Writing Lives project. “I’m also the daughter of survivors, so I know how important it is that the stories get told and kept as a legacy for the families and the children and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren and also for the community at large, which I think is something that this particular program has succeeded in very well.”

Dr. Peter Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, spoke on behalf of the survivors who participated.

“I have been interviewed a number of times by different people, of different levels of experience. So, when I was asked if I was willing to be interviewed by some students from Langara, I thought, ‘Oh well,’” Suedfeld said to laughter. “It’s not going to be very interesting. They are probably amateurs who don’t really know what they’re doing.”

He was pleasantly surprised, he said.

“My expectations were not fulfilled at all,” he said. “They had fresh points of view, they had interesting ideas about the Holocaust, they had interesting questions – not the kind of routine things that I’ve gone through before with more professional interviewers who tend to ask the same questions the same ways. Some of the questions made me think about my own experiences in ways that I never had before…. The interviews were always interesting and lively, occasionally funny, sometimes a bit frustrating and rarely, but once in awhile, irritating. But, all in all, a very positive experience and I expect that most of my cohort probably had similar experiences, and I certainly hope that the students did as well.”

Frieda Krickan, speaking on behalf of the students in the program, saw Writing Lives as an opportunity to honour the survivors, deepen her knowledge of Holocaust history and serve her Jewish community.

“This class has been so much more than that in so many ways,” she said. “It’s been a life-changing experience and I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of it. This class has taught me the importance of personal perspectives and historical documentation. Memoirs put a more human face on history and they memorialize what our survivors have been through and create empathy that historical facts and figures just cannot…. These survivors represent living history. These memoirs are a way of honouring survivors and making sure that history will never forget them…. You cannot get that sort of visceral emotion and intense human connection from a book or documentary. This is a living, breathing human being in front of you opening up about their most intimate and painful memories. It is an experience I will never forget.”

photo - Frieda Krickan, speaking on behalf of the students in the program, saw Writing Lives as an opportunity to honour the survivors, deepen her knowledge of Holocaust history and serve her Jewish community — Frieda Krickan, speaking on behalf of the students in the program, saw Writing Lives as an opportunity to honour the survivors, deepen her knowledge of Holocaust history and serve her Jewish community. (photo by Jennifer Oehler)

She added: “I came out of this class with something I did not expect: hope. Amidst all their personal accounts of suffering and loss, our survivors still managed to impart upon us the importance of hope. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such a life-affirming experience as talking to these survivors.”

Gene Homel, an instructor in liberal studies at the B.C. Institute of Technology who taught part of the Writing Lives course, said evidence-based and factual history are important at a time when the veracity of events past and present are being called into question.

The collection and preservation of eyewitness accounts is what makes the Writing Lives project so valuable, said Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director at the VHEC.

“Some students told me that they would never forget the personal encounters that they had with their interviewees and that they will always carry them close to their hearts. Some even mentioned that this program was life-changing for them,” she said. “Some of the survivors shared with me that they greatly appreciated being part of this program. For them, too, it was a unique experience, as most of them never gave interviews to this extent or in such depth.”

Robbie Waisman, one of the survivor participants, said the greatest fear that Holocaust survivors have is what’s going to happen after they are gone.

“What you are doing gives us hope that it’s going to be remembered, to make this a better world,” he said. “So thank you.”

Serge Vanry, another survivor participant, said it was an experience that he hadn’t expected.

“I started out wanting to do this, but feeling uneasy about somehow getting involved in the past, a past that has been put away quite a bit,” he told the audience. “I was talking about events that I had forgotten, things that were difficult, things that were hard to live with and things that can haunt you. As I was looking back at the past, I started to discover a lot of things that I had forgotten – events, situations that really had disappeared for me.”

Turning to the students, he said: “You did extremely well and I am really thankful and I’ve really appreciated what you’ve done for me, for the things that I don’t want to forget, the things that need to be told again for me and for my family.”

Other survivors who participated in Writing Lives were Alex Buckman, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Jannushka Jakobouvitch and Mark Elster. Excerpts from student-participants’ journals have run in previous issues of the Independent (search “Writing Lives” at jewishindependent.ca).

Mines thanked the Azrieli Foundation, for expertise and materials that made Writing Lives possible, and the VHEC, “which has been crucial, essential, absolutely indispensable in supporting Writing Lives … through liaising with survivors, making their library available for research and as an interview room and, generally, just being generous in terms of their time, their advice, expertise and not to mention moral support.”

Mines added that she hoped this pilot project of Writing Lives would become an ongoing program and, in the days following the closing ceremony, she received the news that Writing Lives will indeed run again, starting in the fall semester.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

The importance of memoirs

This is the third of a three-part series on Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines, in which second-year students are teamed up with local Holocaust survivors to interview them and write memoirs of their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust. The course is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. As part of their course work, students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. This week’s journal is entitled “The Importance of Memoir.” Here are some excerpts.

Our survivor has repeatedly stated that he and his peers greatly fear that, once they are gone, no one will remember what they went through. Survivors worry that, once they are no longer here as living testaments, their suffering and the people they lost will be forgotten. Our class, and other projects like it, is working to ensure that does not happen.

We must preserve the experiences of Holocaust survivors in written form so that, once they are no longer physically here, their story will be. We are not only archiving personal anecdotes, we are putting a human face on history. Facts are important for historical validity, but personal perspectives are essential in creating empathy. This program is chronicling history in such a way as to touch people and make them care about what happened to the Jewish people (and others) during the Holocaust. Empathy is one of the greatest tools in breaking down intolerance. Once we see the humanity in others, it becomes harder to hold onto prejudice and hatred.

Now, more than ever, it is vital to create this historic empathy. Prejudice and persecution are becoming ever more prevalent in our society, and it is up to us as a nation to halt such hatred. It is essential to remind the world what can happen when hatred is met with social apathy. These memoirs are a documentation of the horrors that unchecked hatred can lead to. I believe in the power of memoirs, the power of living history. I am honoured to be a part of such an important project at such a crucial time.

– Frieda Krickan

***

The first time I interviewed a Holocaust survivor, I was nervous, and rightfully so. My interview partner and I had been preparing for months before our first meeting but, nonetheless, when our interviewee arrived, I was so star-struck that I briefly lost my aptitude with the English language altogether. All I could manage to say was multiple renditions of the same sentence, thanking him again and again for his time and for agreeing to meet us.

Our interviewee, R., was gracious and didn’t miss a beat. He chimed in every time by thanking us in return just for listening and told us on multiple occasions, “I am so grateful for what you are doing. This is very important to make sure that the Holocaust never happens again.” His response surprised me but, the more I listened, the more I realized that this project meant more to him than just sharing his story; it was his personal call to tikkun olam, to repair the world the best that he can.

I learned that every Holocaust survivor’s greatest fear is not what you would expect. It is not death camps or gas chambers – instead, R. told us that their greatest fear is that no one will remember their stories when they are no longer alive to tell them. They are afraid that, with today’s ugly resurgence of antisemitism, everything they endured will be meaningless in the face of a society that cannot wait to forget. In a world that wants us to keep silent, it is every survivor’s hope that we raise our voices – that we proclaim the truth until our breath runs out. Our sacred duty is to empower the ones who can no longer empower themselves, and the key to making sure history never repeats itself is to tell their stories.

– Zoe Mandell

***

During this course, my group members and I spent a concentrated amount of time with a child survivor of the Holocaust. Time and time again, he narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the Nazi regime…. His story is inspiring, heroic, terrifying at times, and very emotional. He tells his story with such grace, in such detail, that we could clearly visualize in our minds what he had experienced.

I have heard many stories of those who survived, and the stories they tell of those they lost. I have learned what it was like for a child survivor from Paris, a teenage survivor from Amsterdam and an adult survivor from Warsaw. I have heard the stories of their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters: how they watched their father get shot, or saw their mother walk toward her certain death, or said goodbye to a brother they knew they’d never see again. Telling their stories, writing their stories, is not only a therapeutic technique, but a preventative one. It is important for those who survived to tell as many stories as they can, not to let the memory of their loved ones perish like they did during that awful time in history. It is important to tell the story of their loved ones to keep their memory alive in as many beating hearts as possible. And it is important to tell the stories of the Holocaust, for both survivors and those who perished, to stand up and say, “We survived. We won’t forget. Never forget. And never let it happen again.”

– Marni Weinstein

***

During and after each interview my group conducted with R., he thanked us multiple times. He thanked us for taking the time to listen to his story, for writing his memoir, and even for sharing parts of our lives with him. Every time he thanked us I was taken aback: why was he thanking us for listening to him, when we were the lucky ones? We were being given the opportunity not only to listen to a Holocaust survivor speak but to write a memoir that would continue his legacy throughout time. At first, I struggled with his gratitude; I was almost uncomfortable with how genuinely thankful he was that we were spending time with him and listening to his story. Yet no matter what I said, he was grateful.

It took me quite awhile to grasp exactly why R. felt the need to continually express his gratitude. In fact, R. did not grow up in a world that accepted the events of the Holocaust as facts and wanted to learn more about it. He grew up in a world where no one wished to speak about the Holocaust and its events were contested. He did not conceal his experiences only because they were too painful to revisit, but also because no one wanted to listen.

Not only did those affected by the Holocaust lose their families, their homes, their childhoods and years of their lives, but in many cases they lost their voices. For years, the world refused to listen and, because of that, we lost many valuable stories. Memoirs are important not only because they give survivors the opportunity to share their stories, but because, on a very small level, they begin to give a voice back to the voiceless. Although we can’t bring those survivors back and prove to them there are people who care and will listen, we can make sure the survivors who are still alive do not go unheard.

– Lucy Bogle

Writing Lives journals

Writing Lives is a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines, in which second-year students are connected with local Holocaust survivors to interview them and write memoirs of their lives before, during and after the Holocaust. The project is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. In the first semester, students learned about the Holocaust through reading literary and historical texts, and wrote a research paper on prewar European Jewish communities using the resources of the VHEC and Waldman libraries. This semester, students studied practical strategies for interviewing survivors and have conducted and transcribed their interviews. They are now in the process of writing the memoirs, which, when complete, will be presented to interviewees at a closing ceremony to be held at Langara later this spring. As part of their course work, students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. A recent journal entry was on the theme of multicultural relationships, and here are excerpts from three student journals.

One of my older relatives knew how to count in Japanese. She was not Japanese. My family is predominantly of Filipino descent. She only learned how to count in Japanese because she was forced to learn as a child, during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. I learned this pretty late in her life.

I wanted to ask my relative questions, and I assumed I would get the chance at some point, but I was never sure if it was appropriate to bring it up. Two or three years after I learned that she could count in Japanese, she passed away. I never got to ask my questions.

When I decided to take part in the Writing Lives project, I was thinking of my relative. I have learned that having unanswered questions about someone you care for can lead to painful regret. Because of my own family’s unknown history during the Second World War, I wanted to help another family learn theirs.

– Jonathan Pineda

“Some”

Some feel sad when they see pain,
Some feel fascinated when they see pain.
Some feel broken
Once they see a broken heart.
Some feel fire
And mock that broken heart.

Some reach out a hand
Only to say “got you man.”
Some reach out a hand
Only to say “let me help you man.”
Some are inwards
Some are outwards.

Some love to inflict pain.
Some love to inflict love.
Some grab a gun.
Some grab a seed.
Some ignite a fire.
Some extinguish the fire.
There are always two sides to a story,
Whether good or bad it has a history.

Where do these people come from?
I used to ask.
They come from us,
They used to answer back.
Now I stand with a shattered heart.
Now I stand with a broken back.

Seeing is something.
Hearing is intriguing,
Both are fascinating,
The hearts are something.

– Mojtaba Arvin

I have listened to survivors tell their stories a few times before. Two survivors visited my school when I was in high school, and we had a couple of survivors come to our Writing Lives class last semester. Those were really the only encounters I had with the stories of Holocaust survivors. My family is not Jewish, and were not persecuted during the Holocaust.

My paternal grandfather and his father emigrated from southern Russia in 1925 to

escape the persecution and violence they were facing because they were Mennonites, but we have no personal family experience of the Holocaust or anything that the Jewish people endured. Because I could not bring my own perspective to this course, I am lucky that I had an amazing partner who was able to bring insight into many things because of her Jewish background. Overall, this project has been really incredible. My two partners are so supportive, and I have had the most amazing experience interviewing alongside them and writing the draft memoir with them. This is a project that I will remember my entire life.

– Caylie Warkentin