Tag: Holocaust

Marking memorial’s 30th year

On Sunday, Sept. 24, 11 a.m., at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery in New Westminster, the annual High Holidays Cemetery Service, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Congregation Schara Tzedeck and the Jewish War Veterans, will mark the 30th anniversary of the Holocaust Memorial. On April 26, 1987, 1,300 numbers of the community, including Holocaust survivors and their families, attended the unveiling of the memorial, on which more than 900 names of family members who perished during the Holocaust were inscribed. Survivor Lillian Boraks-Nemetz wrote the following poem after that unveiling 30 years ago.

The Six Million
Written in dedication of the Holocaust Monument in Schara Tzedeck Cemetery

In this cemetery
far away from where They died
you stand dwarfed by this giant monument
your feet sinking lower and lower into the earth
your soul graining deeper and deeper
into the black granite.

You stand an alien to this earth
a born again human
sixty odd years away from the factories of death
of mercy – pleading voices scattered to deaf winds.

You stand in this cemetery
on the anniversary of the Holocaust
staring with hollow eyes
at simulated graves of strangers finally named
who once went to sleep in a common ditch
souls torn from peace like bones from flesh –

a child’s name upon your lips
a child’s fist pressing upon your breath
to break the granite silence
to speak to shout to scream the truth
to silence forever the mad dogs who
deny the happening of Shoah.

You remember as you stand here
waiting your turn to honour the Dead
how you stood with Them then
in line for death only you didn’t die
running away on all fours
through the contaminated sewers like a rat.

You say Kaddish and for a single moment
become one with the living and the dead.
Then you, the survivor, slip away into an alien world
where your soul must learn to sustain alone,
The Six Million.

Meet award-winning artists

Seeking Refuge, written by Irene Watts and illustrated by Kathryn Shoemaker, has been shortlisted for the 2017 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature. Published by Tradewind Books, the graphic novel is one of the three finalists in the children’s/young adult category.

While this year’s Vine winners will be announced Oct. 3 at a luncheon in Toronto, Vancouverites can meet Watts and Shoemaker later this month at Word Vancouver, and again at the Vancouver Writers Festival in October. The multiple-award-winners, who are both founding members of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators of British Columbia Society, have worked together on several publications, including Good-bye Marianne, a graphic novel based on Watts’ play and subsequent novel of the same name, which also included Shoemaker illustrations.

In Good-bye Marianne, readers meet Marianne Kohn. Set in Berlin in 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, the 11-year-old struggles to understand and cope with the increasing restrictions placed on Jews in Nazi Germany, and the fierce antisemitism she and her family encounter, with a couple of exceptions. The story begins with Marianne not being allowed into her school – all of the Jewish students have been prohibited from attending. As well, her father has disappeared. The situation, as we know from history, worsens, and her mother makes the heartrending decision to send Marianne with “a group of 200 children who are leaving for homes in England,” one of the first groups to be rescued in the Kindertransport.

Seeking Refuge sees Marianne safely to London, arriving Dec. 2, 1938. While protected from physical harm in her new country, Marianne does not escape antisemitism and poor treatment.

In an interview with CBC, Watts commented on Shoemaker’s choice of medium for Seeking Refuge, noting how the grey of the pencil was so well-suited to the story.

“Seeking Refuge is a darker, sadder story, taking place in a time of blackouts, black-and-white films, coal-foggy London, especially the winter months, a gloomy time and place,” said Shoemaker in an interview with the Jewish Independent. “In Good-bye Marianne, Marianne is happier than in Seeking Refuge because she is with family, her home, her country, her language. So, yes, the backgrounds are light, often white. She is anxious about her being sent away but she is not yet sad about it. She is not yet a displaced refugee.”

The possibility of using Seeking Refuge as a way in which to teach younger readers about the current refugee crisis has not gone unnoticed by reviewers and interviewers.

“Stories, in whatever genre, help us to discover more about our place in the world and who we are,” Watts told the Independent. “Immersing ourselves in the lives of fictional characters and their stories, we gain insight of how others live.” While acknowledging that readers will “take whatever message they are ready to understand from the books they read,” she added, “Marianne’s story, though set in the past, is still a familiar one. There are many refugees in the world. Seeking Refuge concerns one child, and how she responds to losing home, friends, family, birthplace, language, culture. In reading about Marianne, a reader may wonder how he would cope in this situation; maybe respond with more kindness and understanding to anyone struggling to make a new life.”

Marianne’s story is similar to – but not the same as – that of Watts, who was educated in England and Wales after her escape from Berlin via the second rescue train in December 1938. Skipping ahead 30 years, she and her husband moved to Canada in 1968, she said, “to give our children a better future.” They immigrated to Alberta.

A playwright and director for Theatre in Education and a drama teacher and consultant in England, Watts taught drama in Hobbema (now Maskwacis), where they lived for a short time before moving to Edmonton. In Edmonton, she was director of Citadel on Wheels and Wings, a children’s touring company that traveled all over Alberta. “We even took our shows to schools in the Northwest Territories,” she said, noting that, among the company’s alumni are Jackson Davies and the late Susan Wright.

“After a few years,” said Watts, “my late husband accepted a position in Vancouver and our four children and I followed. This was in 1976. My base was in White Rock, B.C., and I moved to Vancouver in 2000.”

That Watts likes to write in different genres is clear from the way in which Seeking Refuge came into being.

“Good-bye Marianne began life as a play, which premièred at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in 1994,” Watts explained. “It was produced by Carousel Theatre, and toured widely. It has had many productions, both in Canada and the U.S.A., and will be touring with Theatre New Brunswick for three months in the spring of 2018. I had been a playwright long before I became a novelist. I decided to write the novel because there was still much to say beyond the confines of the play. Kathy Lowinger, then publisher of Tundra Books, rescued the manuscript from the slush pile, and published it in 1998.

“I received countless letters from children, wanting to know what happens next, and so completed both the novel and the play Remember Me, on which Seeking Refuge is based. The trilogy, which ends with Finding Sophie, was later published in an omnibus edition, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransport, as Escape from Berlin.”

For readers anticipating a possible third graphic novel, Watts told the Independent she has “no plans to write about Marianne and Sophie again.”

Shoemaker and Watts collaborated on Watts’ first book for Tradewind, A Telling Time, “which places the story of Queen Esther and the story of Purim in three time frames: modern-day Canada, Nazi-occupied Vienna and the biblical era of Persia. So,” said Watts, “when Kathie told me she had read my play Good-bye Marianne and suggested that it would make an interesting graphic novel, I needed no persuasion, and together we embarked on our next project – a new genre for me. Since then, we have done several other books together, for both Tundra and Tradewind Books.”

A Telling Time, which Shoemaker described as “a picture book for older children about the parallel stories of Queen Esther and how she saves her people and a 1939 secret Purim party,” was recognized by the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, with a 2006 White Raven special mention.

“For that book,” said Shoemaker, who teaches children’s literature at the University of British Columbia, “I did a huge amount of research. As well, Irene shared many resources with me.

“While I was illustrating A Telling Time,” she said, “I was working on my MA in children’s literature at UBC. Instead of doing an academic thesis, I wrote a graphic novel. During the process of finishing it up, Irene asked me what it was like to write a graphic novel and I told her that, for her, it would be a snap, as it is very much like writing a play or screenplay, as you write primarily dialogue, and, similarly to writing a play scene by scene, a graphic novel is written panel by panel. In response to my answer, Irene told me that Good-bye Marianne had been a play before it was a novel.”

Shoemaker said she drew up several pages of Good-bye Marianne for Watts to send to Tundra as a proposal for a graphic novel. “It was about to have its 10th anniversary, so it was good timing,” said Shoemaker. “Tundra had never done a graphic novel before but they agreed to it.”

Graphic novels were still a relatively new phenomenon at that time. “Other than Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and books for adults, there were almost none,” said Shoemaker. “It was a bit of challenge working with an editor who did not understand the form and also who didn’t seem to understand how closely Irene and I work.

“You will often hear that editors like to keep writers and illustrators apart. I hate that. Irene and I work closely on everything that we do.”

Their creative process begins with Watts writing a rough draft. “She doesn’t number the panels but she describes all the key actions she wants to see occur along with the dialogue,” explained Shoemaker. “From that version, I go back into the manuscript to visualize the sequence of panels. When I do that, I create panel numbers and add in additional panels that may be close-ups, wordless images and additional panels to handle complex conversations. After I’ve done that, I begin a visual dummy, drawing out the entire book panel by panel. When that is complete, I sit down with Irene and go through it panel by panel. As we go through it, we decide what stays, what goes and what more we might need. The best thing about our working together is that we highly respect each other’s ideas and we both listen, consider and change things without any kind of ownership because we consider the work ours. It is our book, not mine, not hers, but ours.”

Watts and Shoemaker will be at Word Vancouver on Sept. 24, 12:45 p.m., at the main branch of Vancouver Public Library in the South Plaza (the Quay) and the Writers Fest on Oct. 18, 1 p.m., at Revue Stage on Granville Island. For more information on both of these festivals and for tickets to the latter ($17), visit wordvancouver.ca and writersfest.bc.ca, respectively.

Delving into the past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROM’s Evidence Room

Interior perspective of The Evidence Room, with models of an Auschwitz gas column and gas-tight hatch, plaster casts and a model of a gas-tight door. (photo by Fred Hunsberger, University of Waterloo School of Architecture)

Visitors to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) will see an obscene display among the collections of dinosaur fossils, Egyptian mummies and suits of armour – a scale model of a gas chamber of the kind used at Auschwitz, where more than one million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1945.

The Evidence Room exhibit, as it is named, consists of white plaster replicas of elements of the Nazi death camp murder machine, including the steel mesh columns through which pellets of Zyklon B insecticide were lowered to asphyxiate the prisoners locked inside the gas chambers. Similarly, it depicts the heavy door, which was bolted from the outside.

The exhibit features a reproduction of the original architectural drawings prepared by German architect, engineer and SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, who served at Auschwitz as chief of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS.

Visitors to ROM will note the meticulously planned airtight seal around the gas chamber’s door to prevent toxic leaks, and the grill-covered peephole that allowed dignitaries to watch the prisoners die.

“To understand this room … we first have to acknowledge that it’s related to the most murderous place,” said the exhibit’s creator, Robert Jan van Pelt, at a ROM Speaks lecture on June 27.

Van Pelt’s grisly display is the first in a ROM series intended to engender discussion of contemporary issues. And the issue here is forensic architecture, a relatively new field that uses planning and design tools to understand human rights abuses, in this case genocide.

For van Pelt, a Dutch-born architect who teaches at the University of Waterloo, The Evidence Room represents the culmination of two decades of work.

Van Pelt served as an expert witness during a trial, in London in 2000, in which Holocaust-denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt for libel after Lipstadt, in a book, called out the pseudo-historian’s falsehoods. Irving famously quipped “No holes, no Holocaust.”

Van Pelt testified that indeed there were apertures in the gas chambers’ ceilings through which poison pellets were dropped. His testimony led to his 2002 book The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial.

The 592-page volume greatly impressed Alejandro Aravena, curator of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. The Chilean, who was awarded architecture’s Pritzker Prize for his work transforming slums and making architecture a tool of justice and social change, commissioned van Pelt to create an exhibit explaining the workings of an Auschwitz gas chamber. A model was on display at last year’s Venice Biennale.

In preparing for the current exhibit at ROM, van Pelt – together with colleagues Donald McKay, Anne Bordeleau and Sascha Hastings – wrote a supplementary book, The Evidence Room, published by the New Jewish Press in association with the University of Toronto’s Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies.

“It is difficult to imagine the details of a gas chamber, where humans were locked in to die,” says one Holocaust survivor quoted in van Pelt’s new book. “One has to feel the double grates that protected the bucket filled with poison pellets from the desperate hands of the condemned, peer into the bucket, imagine the pellets melting away, the poison oozing out of them.

“I knew a good deal about the Auschwitz-Birkenau murder factory,” says the survivor, “but the gas column really shocked me. Because of what I had read about people thinking they were going into a shower room, I had always imagined the gas being dispersed by sprinklers. Touching that construction had a profound effect on me – a new visceral recognition all these years later.”

And what of the pristine white plaster van Pelt and his architecture students used to build the reproduction?

For me, it jarringly evoked a sense of peace and innocence. But, as well, it called to mind that those murdered in the gas chambers defecated and urinated as they died and that Sonderkommandos (a special unit of slave labourers who removed gassed corpses and hauled them to the crematoria) had to whitewash the gas chambers after each usage.

The Evidence Room is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum until Jan. 28, 2018.

Gil Zohar is a journalist based in Jerusalem.

Grodzka Gate Lublin reunion

A photo from Lublin: Faces of a Nonexistent City, likely taken by taken by Abram Zylberberg. (photo from Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre)

From July 3-7, the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre in Lublin (Osrodek Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN), Poland, will host the Lubliner Reunion – the first international meeting of Jewish inhabitants of the city and their descendants in 70 years.

Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre is an organization run by non-Jews dedicated to preserving Jewish memory. It has been actively pursuing this mission for 25 years, and its program includes meetings, discussions, sightseeing tours, commemorations and artistic events. The reunion will constitute an important element of the celebrations, which mark 700 years since the founding of the city of Lublin, and is designed to emphasize the significance of the Jewish community for the history of the city.

The history of Jews has been intertwined with that of Lublin for several hundred years, and has helped shape its identity. The story of Lublin has been enriched with, among other things, the presence of a well-known yeshivah (Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin), the meetings of the Council of Four Lands (Vaad Arba Aratzot), the activities of local rabbis and social organizations and the work of writer and Nobel-laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Just before the Second World War broke out, the 43,000 Jewish citizens of Lublin constituted one-third of the city’s population. The majority of Lublin’s Jewish inhabitants were murdered during the Holocaust and one of the German death camps, Majdanek, was located on the outskirts of Lublin. The story of Lublin cannot be told without the stories of its Jewish inhabitants, which is why, during the festivities organized to celebrate the 700-year-long history of the city in 2017, the presence of their descendants is vital and symbolic.

“The Lubliner Reunion is a way to build a bridge across time,” said Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, founder and director of Grodzka Gate. “It’s meant as a meeting in which both the people and their stories are important. Grodzka Gate is engaged in protecting the ‘memory of the place.’ We want to preserve what is left of Lublin’s Jewish community. The Lubliner Reunion will allow us to share knowledge and fill the blank spaces in the stories about Lublin and its inhabitants.”

photo - Grodzka Gate in Lublin, Poland
Grodzka Gate in Lublin, Poland. (photo from Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre )

The program of the reunion covers meetings devoted to the history and culture of Jewish Lublin, workshops in genealogy, walks along tourist trails, commemorations and a variety of artistic events. One of the central features of the reunion will be presentations of Lubliner family stories. Guests will have a chance to get to know both historical and contemporary Lublin, visit the former Jewish district and meet non-Jews working to preserve the memory of the Jews of Lublin for generations to come.

Apart from sightseeing within Lublin, Grodzka Gate is also planning tours of the region – Zamosc, Kazimierz Dolny, Belzec and Wlodawa, among other places. Apart from these excursions, all events are free of charge for participants. The inauguration of the reunion will take place on July 3 in the Museum at the Lublin Castle.

“We want to get in touch with and invite all those whose families come from Lublin,” underlined reunion coordinator Monika Tarajko. “We already have participants coming from Israel, the United States, France, Belgium and Great Britain. However, we are still striving to reach as many prospective participants as possible and inform them about the reunion. We are expecting more than 100 people to visit Lublin as part of this special event. Feel welcome to join us!”

For reunion registration and information, visit lubliners2017.teatrnn.pl or contact Tarajko (48-606-687-367, lubliners@tnn.lublin.pl) or the American ambassador to Grodzka Gate, Leora Tec (1-781-862-4976, leora@bridgetopoland.com).

Grodzka Gate’s other projects include Lublin: Memory of the Holocaust, a trail commemorating the Jewish inhabitants of Lublin who perished in the Holocaust; The Mysteries of Memory, an artistic happening involving a piece of the city with its specific topography, history and technical infrastructure; and Henio Zytomirski: The “Letters to Henio” Project, where, on April 19 (Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland) every year, citizens of Lublin send letters to Henio Zytomirski, a Jewish boy who was born in 1933 in Lublin and was murdered by the Nazis in a gas chamber, probably in November 1942.

Grodzka Gate’s Lublin: Memory of the Place Exhibition is dedicated to Lublin before the war. A considerable part of the former Jewish district today has been covered with concrete, under which the foundations of Jewish buildings and the memory of those who once lived there are buried. Over the years, Grodzka Gate has become a place where old photographs, documents and testimonies can be preserved for posterity.

As well, there is Lublin: Faces of a Nonexistent City. In May 2012, Grodzka Gate received a collection of 2,700 glass plate negatives found in the attic of the house at Rynek 4 by workmen doing repairs. The photographs were taken between 1914 and 1939 and were, based on Grodzka Gate’s research and recent findings, taken by Abram Zylberberg.

Grodzka Gate’s website is teatrnn.pl/en.

Making Canada home

Marianne, left, with her father, Otto Echt, and sister Brigitte. (photo from Canadian Museum of Immigration [CMI] at Pier 21)

Marianne Ferguson’s family missed the train that was supposed to take them to Montreal from Halifax. Just 13 at the time, she and her sister were mostly excited at the prospect of something new, although they were sorry to leave friends and family behind in Europe. Their parents, however, were apprehensive, worried about starting a new life in a foreign country. And that was before they got stuck in Halifax – where, almost eight decades later, Ferguson, née Echt, still calls home.

In Europe, the Echts had lived in a little resort town called Brosen, just outside of the Free City of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk. Ferguson’s father, Otto, was a pharmacist and a hobby farmer, and they lived well. Her mother, Meta, had multiple maids; the children – Marianne, Brigitte and Reni – had a nanny, and every spring and autumn a dressmaker would come into their home for a week to create new wardrobes for the upcoming season. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Ferguson’s family was relatively unaffected in the beginning. Even so, her parents saw what was coming and began making contingency plans.

Ferguson’s father kept homing pigeons on his farm. He would go to Poland to deposit money, and send the pigeons back home with coloured ribbons tied to them for Ferguson’s mother to decipher. A yellow ribbon meant he had arrived, for example, while a red ribbon meant he had deposited the money. He was able to get away with this scheme because the guards at the Polish border assumed he was entering his pigeons into competitions.

The Echts continued living in Brosen as the situation deteriorated for Jewish families. When the fair-haired Ferguson traveled to Hebrew school in Danzig with her sister, Hitler Youth would yell at her to ‘Stop walking with that Jew!’ When the Jewish children in the region were no longer allowed to attend school with their peers, the Jews of Brosen opened their own school on a local estate. The estate was at the end of a long street inhabited by Nazis, and it was understood the Jewish children all had to be in school and off the street by 8 a.m.

One day, when Ferguson was about 11 or 12, her streetcar to school was late. As she was walking alone down the long street to her school, a man sent his police dog after her. The dog attacked her, biting her on the elbow.

“And all of a sudden, somebody raised me up. Must have been an angel, really,” said Ferguson in a recent interview with the Independent from her nursing home in Halifax.

It was the milkman. He put Ferguson in his wagon, drove her to school and deposited her inside the gate. Ferguson said that man saved her life.

For her parents, it was the last straw. They decided they had to get out. A member of the Canadian consulate informed them that the country was not accepting pharmacists. Fortunately, though, the consulate worker saw their little farm and suggested sending them as farmers. And so it was that the Echts found themselves coming through Pier 21 in Halifax on March 7, 1939.

When they arrived at the pier, someone called their names and frightened Ferguson’s father. How did people here know who they were? But the woman calling them was Sadie Fineberg, from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services (JIAS). When the Echts missed their train, Fineberg put them up in a boarding house run by a Yiddish-speaking woman, and many Jewish families came to visit them.

photo - Marianne Ferguson
Marianne Ferguson (photo from CMI at Pier 21)

“My parents said, ‘The people were so nice to us, and how do we know what it’s going to be like in Montreal? Maybe we should stay in Nova Scotia.’ And then they helped us with finding the farm, they drove us out … and we moved over there,” said Ferguson.

The farm was in nearby Milford, about a 45-minute drive from downtown Halifax. The Echts had to stay and work the farm for seven years as a condition of their immigration and, after their term ended, they moved to Halifax. Fineberg became a close family friend, and her nephew Lawrence became Ferguson’s husband.

Ferguson’s extended family was not so lucky. Her parents had applied to bring 11 of them over to Canada, and they were supposed to arrive later in the year. Cutting through all the red tape took time, but the process seemed to be progressing. Ferguson’s 11 family members went to meet their boat in Hamburg – but it wasn’t there. That day was Sept. 1, 1939, and the Second World War had just broken out.

“My father had bought a second farm. We were so lucky, it was right next to our farm. We thought we would all be together in the two farms. But it wasn’t meant to be. They were all killed,” said Ferguson.

When the war ended, Ferguson began volunteering with JIAS, helping Jewish refugees find their way in Canada. Many of the displaced persons were children traveling alone. Ferguson remembers one 17-year-old boy in particular who came through Pier 21 in 1948 and needed money to get to Montreal. Ferguson and her mother gave him $20 and some food. They also told him that he would become a good citizen, and he should work hard and make something of himself. Meanwhile, Ferguson continued to volunteer at Pier 21 until it closed in 1971. She began volunteering there again when it reopened as a museum in 1999.

Unbeknownst to Ferguson, the boy listened to her. His name was Nathan Wasser, and he had survived multiple camps in the Holocaust, including Auschwitz. He was trained as an electrician in Munich after the war, so that’s the work he first did after arriving in Montreal. In 1952, he met his wife-to-be, Shirley, at a parade for Queen Elizabeth, who was still a princess at the time. Together, they started a family, having a daughter and a son, and he ventured into the business world. Wasser eventually came to own his own shopping centre.

photo - Marianne Ferguson volunteered at Pier 21 when it was an immigration facility and again when it reopened as a museum
Marianne Ferguson volunteered at Pier 21 when it was an immigration facility and again when it reopened as a museum. (photo from CMI at Pier 21)

Through it all, Wasser – who passed away in 2015 – kept in mind the two women who had helped him when he first came to Canada as a scared and overwhelmed teenager.

“So I said to him, ‘You know, you have this vision of two volunteers. Would you like to go back to Pier 21?’” said his wife Shirley Wasser in a phone interview with the Independent. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ll never find anything.’”

Despite his doubts, Wasser contacted the Atlantic Jewish Council in 2003. The council connected him to Ferguson (her mother had already passed away), and they arranged to meet when the Wassers visited Halifax later that year.

On the appointed day, Ferguson and her granddaughter waited in the lobby of Pier 21 for a man with a blue shirt. Unfortunately, it seemed as if every man was wearing a blue shirt that day. Finally, a couple entered. The man was wearing a blue shirt and carrying flowers.

“My granddaughter said, ‘I think that’s for you.’ And, you know, he recognized me,” Ferguson recounted as she started to tear up.

Ferguson and Wasser stayed in touch until Wasser’s death, and she is still in contact with his wife. Whenever the Wassers came to Halifax, the Fergusons would have them over for Shabbat dinner on the Friday, then the Wassers would take out the Fergusons for dinner on the Saturday. Every birthday and holiday, Nathan Wasser would send a bouquet of flowers to Ferguson.

“He had no words for her, how grateful and how appreciative he was to the pier and the volunteers,” said Shirley Wasser. “I think [Ferguson] was one of the finest ladies I’ve ever encountered.”

“He did save his money and he listened to what we were saying. He said he owed it to us to do well. He was so grateful,” said Ferguson, speaking of her late friend somewhere between laughter and tears.

Alex Rose is a master’s student in journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. He graduated from the same school in 2016 with a double major in creative writing and religious studies, and loves all things basketball. He wrote this article as part of an internship with the Jewish Independent.

Yom Hashoah at KDHS

The Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School Grade 11 history class for which King David High School teacher Anna-Mae Wiesenthal (middle row, second from the right), did a presentation on the Holocaust. Their teacher, Bonnie Burnell, is to Wiesenthal’s left. (photo from Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)

“They were in awe of the Holocaust survivor,” said Bonnie Burnell, a teacher at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary, describing the reaction of her students to survivor Robbie Waisman’s talk at a Yom Hashoah assembly at King David High School (KDHS) on April 24. “Looking at him as he spoke at the podium, they could scarcely imagine him on the inside of a Nazi concentration camp.”

Students from Prince of Wales Secondary School and, of course, from KDHS also joined the assembly, which was organized by KDHS teachers Anna-Mae Wiesenthal and Aron Rosenberg, and included Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanting El Malei Rachamim.

The multi-school initiative was led by Wiesenthal, who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Holocaust and genocide studies. Last year, she went to Austria and Poland with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre of Toronto. In addition to teaching about the Holocaust at KDHS, she has been giving presentations at various public schools. She told the Jewish Independent that students have been very engaged and have asked many questions. This outreach led to the recent assembly at KDHS, where other schools’ students were invited to attend.

photo - Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman addresses the assembly for Yom Hashoah at King David High School on April 24
Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman addresses the assembly for Yom Hashoah at King David High School on April 24. (photo from Anna-Mae Wiesenthal)

“My students, in general, were impressed with the ceremony and glad that they had made the decision to come,” Burnell said. “We have had a real focus on racism in our curriculum this year, and this visit definitely adds something of central importance to that subject.”

Wiesenthal, who has taught at KDHS since 2006, became interested in focusing more on Holocaust education after attending an educators seminar at Yad Vashem in 2012.

“I feel Holocaust education is about giving voice to the millions of victims who were murdered simply because of who they were, and honouring their legacy and our history,” explained Wiesenthal. “It is about remembering the vibrancy of Jewish life both before and after the war. It is about preserving memory for future generations and across cultures. It is about taking the knowledge of unprecedented horrors, and keeping them in front of us so that we remain vigilant about our humanity in the face of genocides today.”

Wiesenthal also admitted to being inspired by a possible kinship with renowned Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Her great-grandfather, Mattityahu Wiesenthal, was a Russian boy saved from forced conscription in the Russian army by being “thrown across the river” from Russia into the town of Skala in Austria-Hungary, as many boys were at that time. As an orphan in Skala, he was taken in by Moshe Efroyim Wiesenthal, who supported many such refugee orphans, and the young boy took the family name Wiesenthal to honour his patron. Wiesenthal does not know if Moshe Efroyim was directly related to Simon Wiesenthal, but the latter remains one of her heroes, and she has been in touch with his granddaughter, Racheli Kreisberg.

Wiesenthal also recently initiated a pilot project at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), in which KDHS students trained as docents (museum guides) lead other students through the exhibit.

Another project was an art exhibit at KDHS, where her Jewish History 11 class viewed a video of a Holocaust survivor’s testimony, chose an aspect of the testimony that stood out for them and then created a work of art based on that aspect. Each work was accompanied by an artist’s statement, a picture of the survivor and why the student chose the testimony they did. Contributions included painting, sculpture, writing and music. “The quality of expression was very moving,” said Wiesenthal.

Rabbi Stephen Berger, head of Judaic studies at KDHS, said he is thrilled with the work Wiesenthal has been doing.

“She shares her passion with her students and fulfils the talmudic dictum, ‘Words that leave from the heart, penetrate the heart,’” he said. “Our school and students benefit immeasurably by having her as a teacher of history and Holocaust studies.”

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Books for people with dementia

Eliezer Sobel created L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life with his parents in mind. (photo from Shutterstock)

Eliezer Sobel’s new book, L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life, was born from personal experience.

Sobel is an artist at heart and has spent his life finding ways to interact with people – through writing, facilitating workshops and running retreats over the past three decades. Three years ago, on his parents’ 67th anniversary, things took a turn for the worse.

“My mother is in her 17th year of Alzheimer’s and is 93,” Sobel told the Independent. “My dad was fine and taking care of her at home until he was 90. On their 67th wedding anniversary, he fell down the stairs. He fell on his head and almost died. Overnight, there were two dementia patients in the house.

“Prior to that, he was driving, cooking and shopping, as well as hiring and handling the payroll for a team of seven aides. He was amazing with it. Suddenly, overnight, I had a brain-damaged dad at 90 years old.”

Sobel and his wife lived in Virginia at the time, which is seven to eight hours away from New Jersey, where his parents lived. After the accident, however, they moved into his parents’ home.

photo - Writer Eliezer Sobel’s parents, Manya and Max, in 2016. They were the inspiration for Sobel’s series of picture books for readers with dementia
Writer Eliezer Sobel’s parents, Manya and Max, in 2016. They were the inspiration for Sobel’s series of picture books for readers with dementia. (photo by Eliezer Sobel)

“We stayed in the house for 10 months, taking care of my parents and trying to get the right kind of help in the house that would enable us to eventually move out,” explained Sobel. “But we stayed nearby so we could monitor and manage the scene.”

His dad recovered a substantial amount of his cognitive and physical ability, but passed away this past November.

The work on the book goes back to 2011. “She didn’t speak English words anymore,” said Sobel of his mother at the time. “She would sometimes make up her own language and sounds. She stopped reading, as far as we knew.

“One day, I came upon her accidentally…. She was flipping through a magazine and I overheard her reading the big print headlines out loud, in English, correctly. I was totally floored. Mom can still read, even if it’s just a three-word phrase.”

Sobel wanted to run out and buy his mom a picture book, one designed for Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers, but he couldn’t find one anywhere. His next thought was to use a children’s picture book, but he was unsure whether his mother could negotiate a book with a storyline. He wanted each page to stand on its own, so it would not require the reader to recall what had happened on a previous page.

“I called up the national Alzheimer’s association and spoke with their chief librarian for the whole U.S. and her response to me was to say that there were 20,000 books for caregivers of those with memory loss,” said Sobel. “I said, ‘I am not looking for [a book for] the caregiver, I’m looking for my mother, the patient. There was dead silence on the other end of the line. She couldn’t think of any such book. Eventually, she did mention one other author who has since become an acquaintance of mine who had a few books, but they weren’t really what I wanted, so I realized I had to do this myself.

“I first did a book that wasn’t just for Jews. It was for anyone with memory loss. It was called Blue Sky, White Clouds, and came out in 2012.”

Sobel – who has also written a novel and a memoir – received such a positive response to this first picture book that he decided to make it into a series.

“My mother got to enjoy the first book a lot,” said Sobel. “Her aides would use it with her almost daily. We would observe that she would zero in on particular photos, ignore certain pages, find a photo – particularly one of a married elderly couple – and contemplate it for 20 minutes and caress the faces.

“These books are for a particular stage of dementia,” he said. “They’re appropriate for someone who’s got enough memory loss and dementia that they won’t be offended or have awareness that this is kind of a simplistic picture book, they’ll just be interested. But they can’t be too far gone, like my mother now, who can’t even look at my face, let alone my book.”

Caregivers often struggle with how to engage people with Alzheimer’s.

photo - A page from L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life
A page from L’Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life. (photo by Olaf Herfurth)

“It’s very hard to find activities to do with someone in that condition,” said Sobel. “So, what I was trying to accomplish was to give caregivers something they could share with the patient … or give patients something they could use on their own…. It was an opportunity for sharing to occur, an activity of quality time. For certain pages, in the earlier stages [of dementia], it stimulates memories, conversations, reminiscences or free association.

“I’m from the creative right brain of things, so I could find things to do with my mother, like empty a box of coins on the table and we’d spend an hour playing with them – pennies over here, stacking the quarters, making a picture of a house with the dimes. Then, I’d say to my dad, ‘See, Dad! There are lots of things you can do with Mom. You could put these coins away and do the same thing tomorrow. She won’t remember.’

“He would call me the next day, and say, ‘Ah, it didn’t work. She didn’t know the difference between a penny and a nickel.’ That was the point. He’s a mathematician and very linear … [he] could not break into the play mode. If you’re someone who’s good with little kids, you can do that with someone like my mom.”

In some ways, Sobel often finds himself feeling grateful to Alzheimer’s, because it made it possible for him and his mother to grow closer – at least for the first 10 years of her disease.

At the beginning, Sobel saw her become more available. As a Holocaust refugee, she had always been very insulated, private and afraid of others. Sobel said he went to a psychic early on in her disease, worried that his mother was losing her memories, and the psychic thought she’d be happier without them.

“It was true,” Sobel reflected. “She transformed from that scared refugee into an open, childlike, loving, laughing angel. People would feel blessed to be around her. She was delightful – greeting strangers and striking up conversations that made no sense. She and I laughed about who knows what. She and my father would dance to music. A lot of things were happy about her Alzheimer’s experience.

“I’m not saying there weren’t nightmarish times. We had our share of those as well,” he added. “She went through a violent period where she was chasing people with steak knives. We had to put her into a psych ward for 10 days.”

That was the exception, though, and Sobel said, “I had an opportunity to finally heal my relationship with her.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

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.

Ring to fund students

Olga Ornstein, the mother of Frank Ornstein. Frank gave his friend, George Szasz, his mother’s ring, which George is hoping to sell to fund a scholarship in the Ornstein family’s name. (photo from Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver)

Last summer, community member George Szasz approached the Jewish Community Foundation, hoping to establish a scholarship endowment fund to honour a dear friend’s memory. The friend, Frank Ornstein, z”l, survived the Holocaust and eventually immigrated to Vancouver. With no children or living family members to speak of, Frank bequeathed a family ring saved from the Holocaust to George, which George is hoping to sell to fund a scholarship in the Ornstein family’s name.

Lipot and Olga Ornstein, both of blessed memory, were an affluent couple in the Hungarian city of Szeged and doted on their only son, Frank. Born in 1924, Frank grew from a skilled boy scout to a star athlete with a wide range of friends. They lived peacefully with their non-Jewish neighbours, and Frank began dating a non-Jewish girl.

Even as anti-Jewish sentiment grew around them, the city’s residents lived amiably together. It was a shock when laws mandated division by 1943. Jews, including the Ornsteins, were evicted from their homes, stripped of their property and segregated in ghettos. As a fit 19-year-old, Frank was sent away to a labour camp. Lipot and Olga were forced onto an overcrowded cattle car without food or water for a three-day journey to a concentration camp in Austria.

Life in the camp was grim. Lipot and Olga wrote Frank postcards, holding onto hope that, after the war, the family would be reunited and return to their life in Szeged. In March 1945, the camp buzzed with news that Russian soldiers were near and the captives desperately hoped for liberation. The day before the soldiers arrived, however, German guards marched the camp’s prisoners, including Lipot and Olga, to a local gym and blew them up.

Frank was liberated from the labour camp and, in late 1945, returned to Szeged, sick but alive. There, he found out that his parents, and most of the city’s Jewish residents, would never return. Frank’s girlfriend’s family had secretly stored some of his parents’ valuables, including his mother’s diamond ring, and returned them to him: memories of a life that had vanished.

Realizing life in Szeged would never be the same, Frank took his few possessions and family mementoes and immigrated to Israel. In Israel, he trained as an airplane mechanic and found both a love and an affinity for the trade. He worked for Israel’s El Al Airlines and immigrated to Vancouver in the late 1950s, as a chief mechanic for Canadian Pacific Airlines and, later, Air Canada.

After Frank’s death in 2006, George was bequeathed the Ornstein family’s mementoes. Frank’s life was marked by trials and resilience, and George is determined to honour the Ornstein family’s history and heritage. Of the Ornstein family keepsakes, Frank’s mother’s ring is of particular value, appraised at between $30,000 and $50,000, and George is determined to sell the ring to establish a yearly scholarship for deserving Israeli students studying Frank’s life passion: airplane mechanics.

If you are interested in assisting George to create the Ornstein family legacy, contact Marcie Flom, director of the Jewish Community Foundation, at mflom@jewishvancouver.com.

This article was originally published by Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver in e-Yachad and is reprinted with permission.