survivor

Remembering Alex Buckman

Alex Buckman with students on the March of the Living. (photo from thecjn.ca)

Alex Buckman, a tireless stalwart for Holocaust education in British Columbia and a steadfast advocate for his fellow child survivors, died in Warsaw on April 21. He was 83. Buckman had been on a trip to Poland accompanying the Coast-to-Coast Canada March of the Living delegation.

Described by those who knew and worked with him as a caring and gentle person, Buckman was president of the Vancouver Child Survivors Group, served as treasurer of the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors & Descendants and had, in recent decades, spoken to thousands of students in the province through the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

In his 2017 memoir Afraid of the Dark, Buckman wrote that he felt compelled to share his story as a Holocaust survivor for two reasons: “First, I want others to know the price of hate. Hate destroys the lives of innocent people. It breaks families apart and its effects are felt for a lifetime. Second, and most importantly, I share my story to honour the memory of my parents. Talking about our stories gives them a chance to live again and gives me the opportunity to remember them.”

Born in Brussels, Buckman was seven months old when Germany invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940. At age 2, his parents sent him into hiding, and he would find shelter in a dozen different non-Jewish homes over the course of the following two years.

Buckman was next handed over to Andrée Geulen, a 20-year-old teacher, for safekeeping. Geulen, who helped to save many other Jewish children during the Holocaust and was later named one of the Righteous Among the Nations, moved Buckman to an orphanage in the town of Namor.

Buckman’s parents would ultimately be sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they perished.

Under the care of his aunt, Rebecca Teitelbaum (Aunt Becky), Buckman immigrated to Canada in 1951. They settled in Montreal. As a young man, Buckman got his first job as a cost accountant for the bakery and delicatessen at a Steinberg grocery store. He went on to attend night school before entering Sir George Williams University to obtain a degree in accounting.

In 1962, he married Colette Roy, and they embarked on what he called a “normal life.” Their son Patrick was born in 1964 and, in 1967, he took his family west to Vancouver, where Buckman found a job as a housing officer for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The position entailed developing homes for Indigenous people across British Columbia.

“It felt so good helping people move into their own homes. It really changed their lives and I loved meeting and working with the First Nations bands. I felt connected to them,” Buckman would write.

Concurrently, he developed an interest in running, competing in both half and full marathons.

Buckman had made a previous excursion to Poland to join the March of the Living in 2010, which he described as one of the “most meaningful” trips of his life. Speaking to the students traveling with him at that time, he reflected, “What will happen when we will go home? How will we deal with injustice? How will we continue to do all the things we have to do? How will you continue the legacy? How will you remember? I know I will remember you always. We spent a week in Poland together. I don’t think I would have made if it wouldn’t be for you. Some people tell me I was there for them – but most of you were there for me.”

He would further ruminate on that trip to Poland in his memoir, writing: “We Holocaust survivors, accompanied by students from around the world, silently walked the three kilometres that separate Auschwitz from Birkenau in tribute to all the innocent lives that were ended there. I walked into the shower room/gas chamber where my mother once stood, her arms most likely tightly holding onto her sister, in 1943. I wept, surrounded by people who truly understood my loss.”

Prior to that trip, Buckman had avoided speaking about his mother’s experiences to, as he said, “protect the kids from the grim reality of the death camps” – not wanting to tell young people that up to 2,500 people were killed at a time in the gas chambers. “But after I had stood in her place, I decided her death deserved to be spoken about.”

During his talks to young people, Buckman would often share the story of the recipe book his aunt created in a dangerous and defiant act while a prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she held an office job at a Siemens factory.

As a means to keep her mind off the dire conditions at a concentration camp, Rebecca Teitelbaum would reminisce about the family meals she prepared before the war. One evening while working at Siemens, she found some brown paper that she concealed in her dress. Later, after stealing a pencil and scissors, she went to her barracks and started cutting the paper into the little squares onto which she would write her recipes.

Buckman held on to the recipe book and, at his speaking engagements, he would leave his young audience members with a copy of Aunt Becky’s gâteau à l’orange (orange cake). He would ask the students to invite their families to make the cake together and to share his story with their mothers, fathers and siblings.

As he detailed in the final section of his memoir, by bringing families together through the recipe and having them share his story, Buckman’s hope was to stop the spread of hate and honour the memory of his own family.

“As a group, we thrived in his care,” said Vancouver author and child survivor Lillian Boraks-Nemetz. “He was a great speaker and carried an important message to masses of students against hate, intolerance and bigotry. Alex is and will be missed by all. May his soul continue to watch over us. May he rest in peace knowing that he is loved.”

Buckman is survived by his wife Colette; son Patrick and his wife Elsi (née Towes); grandchildren Alexander, Jameson and Rachael; and sister Annie Kidorf. Patrick Buckman had accompanied his father to Poland for the March of the Living.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC. This obituary was originally published in the Canadian Jewish News, thecjn.ca.

Survivor breaks his silence

Emerich Klein speaks to a student following his recent talk at King David High School. (photo from KDHS)

For decades, Emerich Klein kept his story of survival during the Holocaust to himself. While raising two children in Vancouver and making a life, he shared nothing of what had happened to him after he, together with his family, was deported to Auschwitz.

After years of cajoling, Klein shared his experiences with Russ Klein, his son, who is principal of King David High School. In 2019, he also sat with interviewer Hodie Kahn and recorded almost four hours of testimony for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

On Feb. 14, with his son the principal at his side, Emerich Klein spoke of his survival story for the first time to an audience, addressing students in a Holocaust studies class. The students had viewed the recorded testimony in advance of the visit.

Klein was born in Uzhorod, Czechoslovakia, in 1930, and lived with his sister Judith and their parents Isidor and Rose on the site of the electric power plant where Isidor worked. They had a large extended family and Emerich remembers Shabbat dinners at his grandparents’ home, with throngs of cousins. His grandparents, who were very traditional, were in charge of the mikveh and his grandfather was a melamed, a teacher.

Emerich’s early childhood was largely uneventful, except for being taunted and beaten up on his way to and from school by non-Jewish kids. At one point, on the advice of a teacher, he loaded his school bag with rocks and took revenge on his tormentors. When one of the bullies dragged the police to the Kleins’ door urging assault charges, Emerich’s father explained how his son frequently returned from school bloody. The cop apologized and left. The father of the bully beat his own son – not for bullying, it would seem, but for being bested by a Jew.

While older people may have sensed the shifting social climate, for kids like Emerich, things seemed pretty good for a time. By 1941, though, Jewish businesses could operate only with an Aryan partner and so an uncle had to close his small bakery.

When Isidor was conscripted – first into the army and then, when Jews could no longer serve in the military, in a work battalion – the family’s fortunes suffered. His boss at the power plant eventually convinced authorities that he was an irreplaceable employee.

One day, a stranger showed up in town, speaking a language Emerich did not understand. The boy took the man to a rabbi and, after the rabbi shooed Emerich away, the man explained that he had escaped Poland and told the rabbi what was happening to Jews there. The man’s stories of ghettoization, forced starvation and worse was unimaginable to the Jews of Uzhorod.

Under the 1938 Munich Agreement, which British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed with Hitler to partition Czechoslovakia, Uzhorod was returned to Hungary, to which it had belonged until the First World War. (It is now in Ukraine.) In 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary, and things got much worse for the Jews living there. When they heard the word “ghetto,” the words of the Polish stranger who had shown up in town returned to them.

Emerich’s grandfather was stopped on the street, beaten up and had his beard cut off. Jews were ordered to report to a cordoned-off area but, because this ghetto was so small, it served mostly as a deportation area. The Kleins remained there only for a couple of days.

They were packed into railway cars, with only room to stand. One big drum served as a potable water supply and another as a toilet. Children were crying, people were moaning.

After several days – Emerich doesn’t know how long – the train stopped. People were banging on the outside of the cars and the doors were flung open. People in striped clothes screamed at them to get out. They had arrived at Auschwitz.

Once they got down off the train, the women and children were separated from the men. The old and sick were yanked across the tracks and packed into big waiting trucks. Rose pushed Emerich to join the men. The boy didn’t want to let go of his mother but she screamed at him to leave. He ran and found his father.

While waiting for the next step in their processing, Emerich saw what he thought were piles of cordwood but he soon realized they were human bodies. The new arrivals were taken to a building for a cold shower, then they were shaved, doused in disinfectant and handed clothing in random sizes.

When an army officer called for metal workers, Isidor volunteered and a fellow prisoner advised Emerich to step forward or risk being separated from his father. Despite his lack of knowledge in the field, Emerich passed himself off as an apprentice. Together, the father and son were separated from the rest of the group and transported out of Auschwitz, on a train again for days, until they arrived in France.

Isidor and Emerich worked at a mine in tolerable conditions, with survival rations for a time, until they were moved again, to a salt mine in Germany. There, they were joined by 1,000 inmates from Poland and Emerich and the others learned the horrors of what was happening further east.

At the salt mine, their job was to break boulders to make gravel and then level out the ground, so concrete could be pored over it. After a time, Emerich was put on burial duty, which was less physically onerous work. A Russian prisoner assured Emerich that the war would soon be over and to keep up his strength. He would move on to factory work, cleaning the floor and cutting aluminum.

In April 1945, the workers were forced on a death march. Planes were flying so low that the prisoners could see the pilots. As the march continued, Isidor insisted he couldn’t go on, but Emerich and two of their friends stuck together and forced the father to keep moving. Eventually, they were loaded onto a train and provided food for the first time in nine days. Then, in the midst of a great commotion, the incarcerated passengers realized that the German army was in full retreat. The guards abandoned the prisoners.

Emerich and his group walked into the nearest town, which was already overrun with freed prisoners. They were put up in a German army base that had been repurposed as a repatriation centre. Tables had been set up for each country and people registered their names and hometowns.

Emerich and Isidor eventually made it back to Uzhorod, but Emerich’s mother Rose and sister Judith never returned. All the extended relatives but two cousins were gone. Emerich spent most of the time crying.

After a few weeks, Emerich left by himself for Prague and registered with the Joint Distribution Committee, after which he was transferred to a displaced persons camp in Germany. He intended to go to Palestine with members of his youth movement, but word came that the British were halting migration.

A friend told him of an opportunity to go to Canada, so they signed up. Six months later, Emerich docked in Halifax and made his way to Toronto, where he stayed for two years. The Jewish community there was highly supportive and Emerich became an apprentice jeweler. Isidor, who in the new world would be known as Robert, and his new wife arrived during this time.

Isidor/Robert had remarried a fellow survivor from Uzhorod, who had a sibling in Chilliwack, B.C., so the family headed to the West Coast. Emerich met his wife, the Vancouver-born Jenny, in a bowling alley during a B’nai B’rith event.

In the King David classroom last month, students asked thoughtful questions and Klein responded. His son told students they were lucky to see the elder Mr. Klein at his most talkative, as getting a sentence from the soft-spoken senior is considered by family members to be an accomplishment.

photo Russ Klein, principal of King David High School, and his father, Emerich Klein, who spoke to a KDHS class in February about his experiences during the Holocaust. — Russ Klein, principal of King David High School, and his father, Emerich Klein, who spoke to a KDHS class in February about his experiences during the Holocaust. *(photo from KDHS)*

A student asked if he ever lost faith that he would survive.

“Yes, definitely,” said Klein. “We lived not from week to week or day to day, but from hour to hour. Life didn’t mean a thing.”

About liberation, he said, “I felt wonderful. I felt that I’d been given a chance to live again, to be human again.”

Asked how his experiences under the Nazis and their collaborators had affected his attitudes toward religion, Klein was blunt.

“It sort of turned me against it,” he said. Nevertheless, he insisted that his two children attend Talmud Torah elementary school. Why?

“To learn about Judaism and to learn about the Holocaust,” he said, turning to his son. “I was not able to talk about it, but you had to know about it. That was the only way that I could get my children to learn about it. They couldn’t learn it through me.”

His decades-long refusal to discuss the past with his children was intended to prevent the next generation from anguish, he said.

“Why should they suffer my pain?” he asked. “That was a terrible thing to think about. Bad enough that I suffered, [why should] they suffer the same thing through me?”

Reflecting on his postwar return to Uzhorod, Klein was again straightforward.

“I went back to see who came back from the family. I spent a month, maybe six weeks there and then I left, never to return,” he said. “It was very difficult. I came up against reality there. Up until then, we did not know what happened to the rest of our family. We were separated and that’s all I knew. I had hopes that everybody was coming back. Nobody came back. So there was no point in me staying there.”

Coming to Canada was wonderful and difficult, he said.

“Wonderful just to get out of Europe – doesn’t matter where,” he said. “I just wanted to get out of that country that was soaked in Jewish blood.” But, he added: “It was difficult – difficult to get used to a new life, a new way of living, a new language, a new country. I was 17 years old. It was very difficult but you make do. You do the best you can. You adjust.”

Settling into life in Vancouver, Klein made family and stability his focus.

“A normal person would try to make a living and get themselves a better position, work your way up in life,” he said. “To me, that was not important. To me, the important thing was family. I concentrated on one thing only. Just to give you an example, all my friends went into business – I did not. They asked me, why don’t you go into business? I said … what happens if it doesn’t go right? These children cannot be hungry. I knew what hunger was. It was so important for me to stay just at a low level but make sure that my family will not go without. That was an effect of what happened to me.”

A student asked why, after all these years, Klein decided to speak.

“Because I was convinced after an awful long time that to be silent is being complicit in what happened,” he said. “You’ve got to talk about it, even if it hurts, you’ve got to talk about it.”

He is concerned by some of the political developments he sees in the world today.

“Most of humanity is very good,” he said. “There are parts of society that are not good. Let’s face it, people can be influenced very easily. If you get a charismatic person, [they] can convince people of almost anything they want.”

Survivor reflects on identity

Marie Doduck speaks with a guest at the launch of her book A Childhood Unspoken on Jan. 22. (photo by Josias Tschanz)

“We survived.” These are the words that adult Marie Doduck would tell her childhood self, Mariette, who survived the Holocaust being moved from hiding place to hiding place over a period of five years.

Doduck was answering a question during a book launch laden with emotion – deeply sad as well as celebratory and with moments of laughter – Jan. 22 at a packed Rothstein Theatre. Her book, A Childhood Unspoken, was just released by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.

In a conversation with Jody Spiegel, director of the memoirs program, Doduck spoke of how she is two people – the European Jewish child, Mariette Rozen, who never grew up, and the Canadian adult, Marie, who she had to create to suit her new surroundings after arriving in Vancouver with three orphaned siblings in 1947.

“Mariette will never grow old,” she said. “The child Mariette will always be the child inside and that’s what survivors live. We left the child that was in Europe, we created a wonderful life here in Canada, but when I speak and when I leave this room Mariette stays in this room and I become Marie again.”

Doduck explained her long hesitancy in sharing her story, not only because of the vulnerability it requires, but because the experiences of survivors like her had been dismissed and diminished in the past.

“As a child survivor,” she said, “we were told that we didn’t have a story.”

For decades after the end of the Holocaust, the term “survivor” was largely reserved for those who had been in concentration camps or subjected to forced labour. Child survivors who had been hidden or otherwise managed to escape capture and murder were deemed not to have suffered like older survivors.

This silent or quietly conveyed message was underscored by the way child survivors were treated after the war, even by well-intentioned adults like the families who fostered some of the 1,123 orphans, including Doduck, who came to Canada under the auspices of Canadian Jewish Congress from 1947 to 1949.

“We were from outer space,” she said of the reactions she and fellow child refugees received from Canadians. “We saw things that children should never have seen.”

Placed in homes with new families, with little or no assistance in addressing what they had experienced, many children did not do well.

“Of the 40 children who came to Vancouver, my brother Jacques and myself, I think, were the only two lucky children who stayed with the same family,” Doduck said. “My sister [Esther] didn’t stay with her first family, she became an au pair. Henri jumped from family to family.”

In some cases, said Doduck, the children were told they would die by the time they were 30 “because we were not normal in the Canadian eyes.”

Doduck wrote the book with Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. Speaking at the event and addressing Doduck directly, Faulkner Rossi acknowledged that the process was difficult.

“You would have to become the child Mariette many times,” she said, noting that Doduck was forced to plumb memories she has tried to forget. Faulkner Rossi said Doduck had to trust her, though Doduck’s “inclination is to trust no one – a crucial Holocaust childhood lesson that is never quite unlearned.”

“It’s a hard process for any child survivor to write their story,” Doduck said, not only because of the emotional toll but also because of the imperfections of childhood memories. “Did we hear it from adults? Did we live it? I wanted the truth.”

Doduck pressed Faulkner Rossi wherever possible to substantiate her recollections with historical evidence. During the process, Doduck recalled things she thought had been lost. “Sometimes one memory triggers another that you thought you had forgotten,” she said.

Doduck is a founding member of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, through which she has shared her history with tens of thousands of students and others. She is also a philanthropist and community leader, volunteering and leading events, including co-chairing, with fellow VHEC co-founder Dr. Robert Krell, the 2019 conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants, in Vancouver.

Before Doduck’s presentation, VHEC executive director Nina Krieger described Doduck as “a force … a formidable and sought-after champion for many community organizations. She is also a mentor and a friend to so many, including me, and has inspired more than a generation of community leaders, especially young women, with her vision, passion, tenacity and work ethic, not to mention good humour and grace.”

The book launch event was presented by the VHEC and the Azrieli Foundation. Doduck’s daughters Cathy Golden and Bernice Carmeli read from the book. Arielle Berger, managing editor of the Azrieli Foundation, noted that, since 2005, the foundation has published more than 150 memoirs of Canadian survivors of the Holocaust. The foundation provides the books for free to schools and universities and also provides teaching resources and training to educators. This was the first in-person book launch since the pandemic.

The full theatre was still during an emotional moment when Doduck addressed her family in the front rows.

“I don’t say it often and I want to say it publicly to my children, my family sitting here, thank you for accepting who I am,” said Doduck, now a great-grandmother, before acknowledging the lack of experience with which she approached parenting. “When I was blessed with my children, my husband had to teach me how to go to the library and get a book,” she said. “I never knew a story to tell the kids.”

As a child, she said, Mariette was never hugged, never put to bed, was never kissed, never had a toy and never had a bedtime story.

“My first toy, I was 36 years old, I was the guest speaker in Winnipeg at a fundraiser,” she said, “and they gave me my first doll. I still have it. The only doll I ever had in my whole life.”

As a founding member of the local group of child survivors who meet regularly, Doduck tried to explain the uniqueness of child survivors to their own children.

“We all passed something to them that we didn’t realize we were doing, a burden that we gave to our children, our firstborn,” she said. “I apologize to all the firstborn. We didn’t mean to put a burden on you.”

She takes pride and sees a sense of progress in the different ways her three daughters have viewed her.

“My middle daughter, Bernice, always accepted me. That’s the way mom is,” she said. “That’s the middle child of all the survivors’ children. And my youngest daughter, Cheryl, may she rest in peace, only thought of me as a Canadian. So, I progressed. I fulfilled my duty in becoming Marie, the Canadian.”

Dutch survivor shares his story

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim (third from right) lit memorial candles with Holocaust survivors (from left) Rita Akselrod, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Marie Doduck, Claude Romney, Peter Suedfeld and Ella Levitt. Behind are Nina Krieger of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and Cantor Shani Cohen of Temple Sholom. (photo from VHEC)

Until 1943, Amsterdam’s Hollandsche Schouwburg theatre was used by the Nazis as a deportation centre for Dutch Jews. The youngest children were placed in a Jewish orphanage across the street. A tram would come at 10-minute intervals, providing a brief window of time during which the Nazi guards outside the theatre would lose sight of the orphanage.

The Dutch underground, in cahoots with the nurses at the orphanage, would smuggle babies and toddlers out of the orphanage during this fleeting moment. A member of the resistance would ride by on a bicycle pulling a garbage can and a nurse would pass a child through a ground-floor window into the receptacle and replace the lid.

One of those children was Peter Voormeij, who shared his Holocaust survival experience with a standing-room audience at the Bayit in Richmond, Jan. 29, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“My mother’s family were Orthodox Jewish and my father’s Roman Catholic,” he said at the event. Both families were against the union, partly due to the religious differences but perceived differences in social status were also a factor. “In any case, they got married and I was a result of their union.”

Soon after Peter was born, in late 1940, his father was arrested by the Nazis, suspected of being a spy, and was incarcerated at a Gestapo facility in Berlin.

Peter’s mother’s extended family fled into hiding, but his mother mistakenly believed that her marriage to a Catholic man, even an accused spy, provided her some security from deportations.

“She refused to wear the yellow star as was demanded of the Jews,” Voormeij recalled. “But a girlfriend of hers told the local police that she was a Jew, they confronted her and insisted that she should wear the yellow star. She did and, as a result, I clearly remember that we were not allowed in the park playground, which I was so looking forward to. No Jews allowed.”

He was only 2-and-a-half when he was separated from his mother. She was taken to Westerbork, the Nazi transit camp in the Netherlands, and transported by cattle car to Sobibor. “I often think of her alone, without her little boy, to have her beautiful blond hair cut and forced into a shower with many other women,” said Voormeij. “But no shower – gas.”

At the end of the war, Voormeij’s father returned to the Netherlands. Through his connections in the underground, he located his son, who had survived in hiding – and who, not yet 5, didn’t know he was a Jew.

Peter was raised for a few years by his beloved paternal grandmother. “There, I grew up in a Catholic household, went to a school attached to the church,” he said. “My memories of the time are reasonably good, albeit one time I was sexually molested by a [Catholic] brother – what else is new?”

When Peter was 12 years old, his grandmother died. He then returned to his father’s home, but now had a stepmother who he detested – and the feeling was mutual. One day, during a row, she yelled at him: “You are a typical Jew!”

“From that moment on, my life changed,” he said. “I realized that I am indeed a Jew. I looked at the church in a different way and I couldn’t understand why the Jews were persecuted and killed.”

However, he understood the implications of his new identity. “I became afraid of being a Jew and kept my mouth shut from then on,” he said. “Nobody will ever know that I’m a Jew.”

He indeed kept his identity largely secret. He excelled in school and received a scholarship to art school in Adelaide, Australia – four years with all expenses covered. He became a noted painter and art teacher, completing a master’s degree at what would become Concordia University, in Montreal, and later moving to New York City and back to the Netherlands. A turning point came in the early 1980s, during a conversation with a Dutch gallery owner who was to exhibit some of Voormeij’s work.

“She told me she despised the Jews,” he recalled. “At that point, something broke in me and I told her I was a Jew and left the gallery for good.”

He contacted his uncle, a brother of his mother who had survived by escaping to Switzerland. “My uncle introduced me to what it was like to be a Jew,” he said. “He gave me my first kippah and taught me some Jewish prayers. He also took me on my very first visit to a synagogue.”

At times, when he was alone with his uncle, he would ask about his mother. “I was dying to know more about her,” he said. “He was the only one that could remember. There was nobody else I could ask. Each time I brought her up, he would cry and I would cry with him while holding his hand.”

Eventually, Voormeij and his wife moved to British Columbia and he met a member of the Child Survivors Group that operates out of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). He joined and found a place among fellow child survivors.

The Jan. 29 event was the fourth annual commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Richmond. It was co-sponsored by the Kehila Society of Richmond, the VHEC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

Rabbi Levi Varnai emceed the ceremony and spoke as a child of a survivor, noting that his grandfather was murdered when he was younger than Varnai is now. Cantor Yaakov Orzech recited the memorial prayer El Moleh Rachamim.

Parm Bains, member of Parliament for Steveston-Richmond East, brought a message from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal government. Kelly Greene, member of the B.C. Legislature for Richmond Steveston, brought greetings from Premier David Eby and the provincial government. Members of the Legislative Assembly, Henry Yao and Teresa Wat, were also in attendance. Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie spoke and four councilors – Bill McNulty, Chak Au, Andy Hobbs and Laura Gillanders – also attended.

Pascale Higham-Leisen, VHEC program coordinator, introduced Voormeij. Bayit president Keith Liedtke introduced the mayor, who noted that the day of the commemoration – Jan. 29, two days after the official International Holocaust Remembrance Day – was also the sixth anniversary of the mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque, in which six worshippers were murdered.

A smaller, invitation-only ceremony was held Jan. 27 at Vancouver City Hall. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim lit memorial candles with six Holocaust survivors: Rita Akselrod, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Marie Doduck, Ella Levitt, Claude Romney and Peter Suedfeld. He also expressed condolences for a terror attack that happened earlier in the day at a Jerusalem synagogue, where seven people were killed. Bridges and buildings around the province were illuminated in yellow that evening to mark the memorial day.

Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, which partnered with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver to organize the civic event, thanked the assembled city councilors for recently adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism. Cantor Shani Cohen of Temple Sholom recited El Moleh Rachamim.

Survivor receives ovation

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz speaks at Government House on Jan. 19. (photo from ltgov.bc.ca)

On Jan. 19, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz received a standing ovation for her speech at an event hosted by the lieutenant governor of British Columbia, Janet Austin, at Government House in Victoria.

In a mere 12 minutes, Boraks-Nemetz took the audience through the horrors she suffered during the Holocaust: the rise of anti-Jewish laws, the killing of her younger sister, the escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, the separation of family and the loss of identity – each with its own devastating consequences. She also spoke about the trauma that accompanied her after moving to Canada.

She began by quoting the words of Janusz Korczak, the Polish doctor, educator and head of an orphanage in Warsaw, who was killed with his charges at Treblinka in 1942. He wrote, “the well-being of a country is as good as the well-being of its children.”

To that quote, Boraks-Nemetz added, “When you look around, it seems that the world itself is not in good standing on this issue. I know this to be true as a childhood witness of the Holocaust and as an adult witnessing the present lives of strife for many children in various countries: fighting wars, poverty and hunger.

“My own childhood ended the day Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Our happy lives ended and I became an adult at the age of 6. All Jewish children were automatically sentenced to death by Hitler and the Third Reich, and I was one of them. A million and a half Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust – among them almost all my cousins and my sweet little sister.”

Boraks-Nemetz described her experiences as both a First and Second Generation survivor. She spoke of bearing not only her legacy, but the legacies of her parents, who survived the Holocaust but were not the same parents as before, mourning the loss of their young child and other tragedies. She discussed the interval following the war to the time the barbarity of what occurred began to register.

“The hidden child gnawed at my soul wanting to get out. I chose to live for many years like a good Canadian housewife and mother, but when I reached the age of 40, all hell broke loose. I fell apart and there was no help,” Boraks-Nemetz said.

“Trauma,” she added, “leaves behind a deep wound that, when unhealed, will eventually begin to start creating an emotional pain which won’t let you cope with an ordinary life. [It’s] a pain that few understand.”

The ensuing breakup of her family, she recounted, took many years to repair. At a certain point, she was able to put the pieces back together and begin to understand the root of her pain through telling her story to students and adult groups, and through writing novels and poetry. Boraks-Nemetz is the author of several books, including The Old Brown Suitcase, Mouth of Truth and, most recently, Out of the Dark, a collection of poetry.

“I wanted to understand how the past shaped my present and, above all, I wanted to mend my relationships with my children of whom I am so proud – my Second Generation children who also bore the brunt of my pain and whose forgiveness and understanding mean more to me than life,” she concluded.

The moment Boraks-Nemetz finished speaking, the crowd rose to its feet.

Titled Reconciliation and Holocaust Remembrance: Conversations on Intergenerational Trauma and Healing in Jewish and Indigenous Communities, the evening included short presentations by Nina Krieger, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and Chief Robert Joseph, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a former member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council.

Afterwards, Austin led a dialogue between panelists Marsha Lederman, arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail and author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust Once Removed, and Carey Newman, a multi-disciplinary Indigenous artist, master carver, filmmaker and author. Their discussion explored experiences of healing across communities that have suffered intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust, residential schools and racism.

“I am grateful for the courage of these survivors and their children for the gift of their stories and sharing such intensely personal experiences so generously. In the pursuit of truth, we must deepen understanding and seek to connect in our hearts, to heal together,” said Austin.

“It is always my honour to sit with Holocaust and residential school survivors, as well as distinguished advocates for hope, help, healing and reconciliation. Acknowledging and addressing trauma is the key to better health and recovery. A good friend of mine once said to me: ‘We must always work together in dialogue and never compare trauma,’” said Joseph.

The Government House event was held in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island.

“With discrimination and racism on the rise here in B.C. and around the world, it is now more important than ever that the experiences and lessons learned from the Holocaust, residential schools and other forms of discrimination and racism remain present in the public mind so that history does not repeat itself,” said Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of Vancouver’s Jewish Federation. “Only by learning from the past can we prevent such hatred and atrocities in the future.”

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Unique testimony on stage

Kalman Bar-On, left, and Leopold Lowy at their reunion in 2002. (photo from Richard Lowy)

An SS guard walked down the line of prisoners gathered for roll call at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and randomly picked two boys out of the line. Kalman Braun and Leopold Lowy would spend the next six-and-a-half months together working as servants in a guard shack, giving them a unique viewpoint on what was happening in that place during some of the final months of the Second World War.

The boys, who each had twin sisters and were, therefore, of interest to the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, would survive the Holocaust, as would their sisters. Lowy moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver, Braun moved to Israel and became Kalman Bar-On – the two would not see each other again for more than half a century.

Their story was shared at the Rothstein Theatre Jan. 26, the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Richard Lowy, son of the late Leopold (or Leo) Lowy, presented an immersive experience that included first-person testimony, with Richard Lowy speaking the words, variously, of Bar-On, Leo Lowy and himself, as the son of Canada’s last surviving “Mengele twin,” who passed away in 2002, just a few months after he reconnected with Bar-On. Next year, Lowy intends to release a book based on hours of interviews he did with Bar-On.

The testimony, which Lowy presented last year in a similar format in Tel Aviv, is extremely rare, he contends, because of the unique vantage point his father and Bar-On had on concentration camp operations for half a year.

“This is these two Jewish kids, 15 years old,” Lowy told the Independent before the presentation, “cleaning the [SS] barrack, staring over the shoulders of the SS guards, at the front window looking out into the camp and watching the things that are going on, the selections, the liquidation of the Gypsy camp, the uprising of Crematorium IV, which is about 100 yards away from them. They can hear the fire pit and the people screaming.”

The reunion of Lowy and Bar-On, 57 years after liberation, almost didn’t happen. Richard Lowy had produced a documentary on his father’s Holocaust experiences, called Leo’s Journey. (This film and a shorter one about the reunion are available at leosjourney.ca.) The program aired on the National Geographic Channel in Israel and Bar-On happened to see it. He didn’t recognize the older Lowy, who he knew only as “Lippa,” but when a photo of the younger Leopold flashed across the screen, Bar-On was astounded.

“He’s looking at the screen and saying, ‘It’s my Lippa, it’s my Lippa,’” Richard Lowy said. Bar-On, who credited Leo Lowy for helping him survive the Holocaust, made a few calls and, before long, the telephone rang in the Lowy condo in Richmond. By this time, Leo was experiencing some dementia and it took time for him to realize who he was speaking with.

A reunion was quickly planned and Bar-On flew to Vancouver, where TV cameras captured the emotional meeting. As Bar-On shared his recollections, Lowy’s memories were also sparked. Subsequently, the younger Lowy recorded hours of testimony at Bar-On’s home in Tel Aviv.

“Kalman has a crystal clear memory of dates, times, places,” said Lowy. “By the month, by the week, by the day, by the hour, by the minute of things that were going on.… The guards treated them like mice.”

The teenagers witnessed and overheard things that they then shared with others in their barracks, where they returned at night from the comparative comfort of the heated guard shack.

“It put them in a very unique situation, but still dangerous,” said Lowy. “Think about it. You’re in a guard shack with SS guards. You do something they don’t like, they beat the crap out of you. But they do it in such a way that they are not going to break your arm, they are not going to kill you, because you are a ‘Mengele twin.’”

The building where the boys were assigned was particularly central.

“Leopold and Kalman’s guard shack was right at the top of the camp, outside of the hospital, right beside Kanada [where valuables stolen from prisoners were stored], right beside Crematorium Number IV, and you are able to see and hear all the different comings and goings,” he said. “Kalman gives us an overview of an area of the camp, the hospital camp, that I have never really read before.”

Leopold protected Kalman by, for instance, covering for his friend at work when Kalman could not move an arm after being injected with an experimental substance.

Bar-On has provided videotaped testimony to Yad Vashem, said Lowy, but it is about 35 minutes long, like many other survivor testimonies.

“I have about 14 hours of testimony,” said Lowy, “which basically takes me back to the time he was born, what his family was like, what it was like going to the yeshivah.”

Organizations like Yad Vashem that collect survivor testimonies do not have the resources to go into the depth with each individual that Lowy did with Bar-On, he said.

“I’m not interviewing thousands of people,” he said. “I don’t see how it would be possible to get 14 hours of interviews from every single survivor. I think that would just be an incredibly difficult challenge.”

Individual stories, though, are critical to understanding the Holocaust experience, said Lowy, noting monographs written by people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, the more than 100,000 hours of testimony assembled by the USC Shoah Foundation, which was founded by Steven Spielberg, and films such as Sophie’s Choice, The Pianist and Schindler’s List.

At the event last month, projected images and video footage illustrated the narrative, while Lowy spoke, accompanied by violinist Cameron Wilson and cellist Finn Manniche.

The event was presented by Ward McAllister and Michelle Kirkegaard of the development firm Ledingham McAllister, who are friends of Lowy’s and funded the production. Volunteers from Na’amat Canada helped with the logistics.

An intense, urgent read

A formula for survival for a child in the Holocaust: “Don’t trust anyone; never speak unless spoken to; never give your real last name; if you see your brothers and sisters, don’t run to them: cross over to the other side of the street. Don’t cry and don’t get sick; just survive.”

This is how the character of Mariette Rozen of Brussels, Belgium, aka Marie Doduck of Vancouver, Canada, was fashioned during her formative years between the ages of 6 and 11 during the Holocaust, beginning in 1940. Those words of caution from her older brother Jean, painfully scoured from the mists of Marie’s memory, have become a kind of coat that one takes off in polite company, but it is a mantle that never left her, even in her 80s, as Marie looks back in her memoir on her two lives: a child Holocaust survivor and a Canadian with a lifetime of achievement in the arts, family life, business and service to her community.

Entitled A Childhood Unspoken, this book of only 138 pages is a powerhouse! Co-authored and researched by Simon Fraser University history professor Lauren Faulkner Rossi, the memoir is written in two authentic voices: Marie Doduck the Canadian citizen, 86-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who, while recollecting her past, slips back into Mariette Rozen, being hunted or hiding in Belgium in the 1940s or transitioning to a new life in Vancouver in the 1950s. I began reading the first chapter silently. Then, the urgency and honesty of the voices behind the prose came alive. I wound up reading the entire book aloud to my partner Ruth, who grew up with Marie and shares high school memories with her.

It was an intense experience. There is in the book an urgency to at last speak the unspoken repressed memories of her traumatic childhood, to unearth and – most importantly – to verify the truth of Marie’s memory about where Mariette had been, with whom and where she lived as she was bounced from one location in Belgium to another while running from the Nazis. Marie wondered: did Mariette really see her mother and brother snatched from a Brussels street by the Nazis or did that happen in a dream? Did she have grandparents? This and much more was verified through Faulkner Rossi’s research. Marie’s memory grew clearer, however, when she described the frustration of Mariette the teenaged refugee whose lack of English drove her to draw pictures in order to communicate with her Vancouver foster parents, the Satanoves.

But Mariette desperately wanted to catch up on her education, to fit into the Kerrisdale schools of Vancouver. To become a Canadian. Very quickly, and to the amazement of other children, she not only learned English but even seized leading singing roles in school operettas. As a married woman, the same talent, grit, brains and determination guided Marie to leadership roles in her children’s schools, in her synagogue, in Jewish charities and in business with her husband, Sidney Doduck. She gained such a wide reputation as a Holocaust witness and survivor that she was invited to address the German parliament, which she refused.

Several of the Shoah episodes retold by the Doduck-Rossi team bear repeating here. In a Belgian orphanage where Mariette’s Jewish origins had been carefully guarded, one of the nuns told the Nazis about her but then confessed it to the Mother Superior, who quickly opened a sewer for Mariette and banged the metal plate closed over her. Mariette waited for hours, terrified in the black sewer while rats crawled over her and the boots of Nazi soldiers clanged on the metal plate above. The Nazis left empty-handed.

Chased by Nazis, Mariette took shelter in a Belgian barn but knew that she couldn’t hide in a loose haystack because they would be probing them with pitchforks, so she chose a tightly-bound bale, dug a hole for herself, crawled in and pulled the hay in behind her. Sure enough, a Nazi came and began probing the loose stacks with a pitchfork. As he left, he stuck the fork into Mariette’s bale and pierced her hand. When the farm housewife came to rescue her, she found blood all over and took the child into the kitchen for repairs. “Who is doing all the screaming?” Mariette wondered out loud. “It’s you,” said the woman as she disinfected and bandaged the wound.

Although Mariette saw much brutality and death, there were some good people. Among her many saviours was a “good” German soldier. Mariette had been swept up on a Brussels street along with many other Jews and non-Jews, packed into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp overnight. When the doors slid open at the camp, a Nazi soldier screamed in German, “What is my sister doing on this train?” Without hesitation, Mariette began screaming back the few German words she knew and the Nazi soldier took her off the train, put her into a motorcycle sidecar, drove her to the outskirts of town and dropped her off.

I was inspired by Marie’s Judaism. There is also much to be admired about her lack of hate and her anti-hate philosophy, her lack of self-pity and the life force that drove her to accomplish so much and to give back so much. Yet this book is also a tribute to Marie’s brothers and sisters and to all of those approximately 1,200 traumatized Jewish children who were brought to Canada after the war and strove to fit in and to make themselves a new life. It’s a memoir that Marie’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can proudly cherish as a history of their ancestor who is one of this country’s great Jewish Canadians.

Stan Goldman is a retired English teacher who lives in Richmond.

“Never again” still resonates?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MLA Adam Olsen represented the Green party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A grandfather’s story – available online to May 7

The documentary How Saba Kept Singing had its world première last weekend as part of HotDocs. It can be accessed online until May 7.

The film starts with David Wisnia preparing for his return to Auschwitz-Birkenau after 70 years. Traveling with his grandson and musical partner, Avi, David reveals some new stories about his survival journey. Throughout his life, he had selectively shared details about his war experience, mentioning that his singing voice provided him with privileges that aided in his survival. However, he omitted a major detail – a love affair with a fellow prisoner is what actually helped save his life. Told through David’s perspective, the truth regarding his survival some 75-plus years ago is uncovered.

The film is written, directed and produced by Sara Taksler. It is executive produced by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, and produced by Retro Report, HiddenLight Productions, in association with Burnt Umber Productions.

To buy a ticket to watch the documentary online, go to hotdocs.ca/whats-on/hot-docs-festival/films/2022/how-saba-kept-singing.

– Courtesy HotDocs

A child survivor reflects

At 80, Dr. Robert Krell opens up in his new book.

Dr. Robert Krell, child survivor, psychiatrist, community leader and founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, is probably known to most readers. But few people, perhaps even those closest to him, know him as well as they will after reading his extraordinarily vulnerable new memoir.

Krell acknowledges that he has held much back from the public and his closest family and friends. But, at 80, he has decided to open up in a book called Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher (Amsterdam Publishers).

Krell begins by talking about the duality of his life – the hidden child who, as an adult, tried to remain hidden versus the public figure whose career and community activities have placed him at the fore of various fields; the sadness at his core versus the upbeat visage he presents to the world.

“I have allowed family members and friends to see my inherent optimism and love of life. I live with few regrets,” he writes. “Blessed with a fascinating career, lasting friendships and an incredible family, I have kept at a distance my profound sadness, chronic fears, devastating shame, incapacitating shyness, and nightmares and preoccupations shaped by my earliest experiences and forged in an atmosphere of potential annihilation.”

Krell was 2 years old when his Dutch Jewish parents placed him in hiding with the Munnik family, who he would come to view as his actual parents. He was reunited at age 5 with his birth parents, Emmy and Leo Krell – a miracle on many fronts given the small proportion of Dutch Jews to survive to 1945.

“After liberation, life became very complicated,” he writes. He had been treated well by his rescuing family, unlike some Jewish children, “but strangely, even those ‘good’ circumstances exacted a psychological toll that never quite healed. After all, my relatively ‘benign’ circumstances were still completely off the scales of what is normal, including separation from my parents, shattering of security, and vague awareness of persecution that contributes to the feeling of shame experienced by a child as having done something wrong to cause the situation. Years later, as a child psychiatrist, I would see this phenomenon in children who, faced with parental separation, assumed responsibility.”

His parents also survived in hiding and his mother in particular never stopped mourning the complete loss of both sides of their extended families.

“I was raised by psychologically wounded parents, no less so than if they had been in the camps,” says Krell. “For three years, they lived in fear of being caught, and that fear exacted a psychological toll that one cannot underestimate.”

Trying to recreate a life, they considered making aliyah to the new state of Israel, but their business before the war had been furs and the climate in Canada was more conducive to that specialty. They came to Vancouver in 1951.

Like many survivors, the Krells found new “family” at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. Despite many survivors bearing a “burning rage against G-d,” the shul was a second home. His father refused to open a prayer book. And yet, years later, when he was in a position to be philanthropic, he spoke with Rabbi Mordechai Feuerstein and donated $30,000 to buy prayer books for the High Holy Days so that congregants wouldn’t have to carry them to and from synagogue on those days.

“Why would a man who no longer prayed purchase prayer books?” asks Krell. “The rabbi characterized Dad as ‘a man of faithful disbelief.’”

Habonim, the labour Zionist youth movement, was a major stabilizing force for young Robbie. He would attend weekend events, summer at Camp Miriam and do normal Canadian teenage things like matinees at the Stanley Theatre on Granville.

A late-in-life baby, his brother Ronnie, was born in 1956, and his mother’s disordered parenting shifted from the first born to the younger.

“Her subsequent attention to Ronnie grew so intense that even my 16-year-old self realized that he fulfilled her need to replay the years in which I had been lost to her. That need virtually enslaved my younger brother and freed me.”

While building a career as a clinical psychiatrist, professor and academic administrator, Krell and wife Marilyn were raising three daughters.

“I can barely believe that my survival as a young boy has led to the rebirth of an entire Jewish family that now includes nine gorgeous grandchildren,” he writes. “My good fortune scares me. Our world looks so dangerous, and the future of life – Jewish life – remains so precarious. But day-to-day, we are a close family, and every day brings much joy – so far.”

Krell was a leader in Canadian Jewish Congress regionally and nationally. In Vancouver, he became immersed in Holocaust remembrance and education. Kristallnacht commemorative lectures and other Holocaust remembrance events were often begun under the auspices of CJC.

With theologian William Nicholls and English literature teacher Graham Forst, Krell launched what has become a decades-long annual symposium for high school students on the Holocaust.

He was also among the first people anywhere to begin video recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Krell was also pivotal in the organizing of a succession of world conventions: first, for Holocaust survivors and, later, for “child survivors,” a term he acknowledges was not in use until the 1980s. Hidden children were not viewed as Holocaust victims in the way that survivors of the camps or partisan fighters were. Krell is among a small number of people who helped usher in a reconsideration of the wartime experiences of these children.

In 1984, he gathered 18 survivors and children of survivors in his living room and committed to creating a Holocaust education centre in Vancouver. But some of the older attendees remembered an as-yet unfulfilled promise to create a permanent local memorial to the Shoah, so the group decided to keep that commitment first.

“The memorial was unveiled on Yom Hashoah, April 26, 1987, in the presence of 1,300 members of the community,” notes Krell. “The survivors now had a metzeivah, a ‘burial site,’ albeit symbolic, to visit and to grieve.”

In 1994, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre opened, with Krell as founding president.

One time, when he was on the national board of CJC, the organization considered ending their efforts to bring (by then aging) war criminals to justice.

“I argued for continuing the effort,” says Krell. “My measure of success was different. I told my colleagues that it was not only about successful prosecution but also their knowing that, one day, they might hear a knock on the door. The sleep of Nazis should be no less disturbed than that of Holocaust survivors.”

Throughout the book, Krell recalls brushes with history and the figures who make it.

On a trip to Israel as a young adult, he was able to get a seat at the Eichmann trial, thanks to an aunt who had married into the family of Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor of the case. On the same trip, Krell went to Sde Boker and ran into David Ben-Gurion.

A few years later, Krell volunteered to serve in the 1967 war as a doctor fresh out of his internship but, given the chronology of the Six Day War, by the time he got to Europe, the conflict was over.

Two years after that, on another trip to Israel, his plane was hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Krell was able to attend the ceremony when his family-in-hiding – Albert and Violette Munnik and their daughter Nora – were inducted by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations (posthumously for Albert).

Krell’s book evokes an array of emotions. The psychiatrist’s self-assessment provides a sometimes startling look inside.

“I kept my rage suppressed, not repressed,” he writes. “It was not unconscious. I knew that it was there. I felt in danger from it and feared losing control. I played, studied and worked hard, surrounded by good friends.”