survivors

Survivors share their stories

Charlotte Schallié, a University of Victoria scholar and Holocaust historian who is leading the graphic novel project, with survivor David Schaffer and graphic artist Miriam Libicki, left, at Schaffer’s home in Vancouver in January 2020. (photo by Mike Morash)

A University of Victoria project, first announced in January 2020, came to fruition this spring with the release of But I Live, a graphic novel that tells the stories of four Holocaust survivors.

But I Live involved an international team of researchers, students and institutional partners from three continents, and brought together four survivors and three graphic artists to create an autobiographic series recounting one of the darkest periods in human history. The survivors who told their stories were Emmie Arbel (Israel), Nico and Rolf Kamp (Holland) and David Schaffer (Canada). Their stories were transformed into art by Barbara Yelin (Germany), Gilad Seliktar (Israel) and Miriam Libicki (Canada). The project was edited and organized by Charlotte Schallié, chair of the department of Germanic Slavic studies at UVic and head of Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education at the university.

image - But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust book cover — But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust was published by New Jewish Press (2022).

“Many people in North America have learned about the history of the Holocaust through survivor stories that are repeated in popular culture, which largely focus on survival in the concentration camps or experiences of hiding in Nazi-occupied territory,” said Schallié. “The three stories in But I Live complicate these mainstream narratives by exploring complex topics such as the burden of memory, the need to testify, the ripple effects of trauma and the impact of the Holocaust on descendants of survivors, for example. As historical documents, they are also important for centring the survivors’ experiences and enabling them to tell their own stories.”

Though the gravity of the crimes committed during the Holocaust is well documented, the majority of visual records were largely produced by the Nazis and their collaborators. “These are important historical sources,” said Schallié, “but a sole focus on documentation produced by perpetrators ignores the value of survivors as living knowledge-keepers.”

An objective of the project, therefore, was to turn the perspective over to the survivors. “A survivor-centred approach to gathering testimony about the Holocaust honours the integrity and humanity of the person’s lived experience, while respecting their right to tell their own story,” Schallié said.

Another consideration in the project was time – the majority of Holocaust survivors alive today were young children during the war and are now in their 80s and 90s. The importance of learning from these knowledge-keepers is increasingly vital.

“If we don’t engage them in our research now, their expertise and experience will soon be lost,” Schallié stressed.

There is, in her view, a moral obligation and duty to collect and preserve survivor testimonies. “Each voice that was marked to be silenced by the perpetrators of these atrocities matters greatly and needs to be heard and acknowledged,” she said.

An additional goal of But I Live is to interest young readers in Canada, where high schools are not mandated to include the study of the Holocaust in their curricula.

“We hope that our visual storytelling work will appeal to youths and young adult readers, and elicit within them a deep sense of empathy that leads them to think critically about the historical past and present,” said Schaille.

“Holocaust survivor stories that are presented as heroic narratives, where the storyline progresses from dark to light – or from a site of danger to one of safety – place a heavy burden and responsibility on survivors, whose life stories and memories are unlikely to conform to that model, and simplifies the reality of their lived experiences. But I Live holds space for fragmented memories, difficult emotions and the afterlife of trauma. In doing so, it complicates mainstream tropes, clichés and iconographic imagery that is sometimes misappropriated or exploited in popular culture,” she explained.

image - A panel from “A Kind of Resistance,” a graphic narrative by Miriam Libicki from interviews with David Schaffer — A panel from “A Kind of Resistance,” a graphic narrative by Miriam Libicki from interviews with David Schaffer. (image by Miriam Libicki)

The work at UVic expands on previous projects, such as the book On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony by Henry Greenspan of the University of Michigan, which focuses on survivor accounts while being mindful of the trauma such memories can evoke.

“Eliciting experiences and memories of extreme human suffering from the survivors necessitated a research process and practice that privileged their safety by minimizing the risk of re-traumatization, managing potential triggers and providing sustained support for all participating project partners,” Schallié said. “This approach ensured that we – the stewards of survivor memories – honoured what we felt was our obligation and duty to amplify the voices of the Holocaust survivors.”

But I Live was released by New Jewish Press, a division of University of Toronto Press. A German edition, Aber ich lebe, was published by C.H. Beck in July and has received positive coverage in the German broadsheets Der Tagesspiegel and Die Zeit. In November, the book received a German LUCHS-Preis for literature.

On Oct. 23, But I Live won the 2022 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for biography, presented at York University in Toronto. At the ceremony, the project was lauded for exemplifying “the power of the non-fiction graphic novel to convey the experience and aftereffects of the Shoah.… The historical essays, an illustrated postscript from the artists and personal words from each of the survivors offer a profound meditation on the past and its reach into the present.”

But I Live will be featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival here in Vancouver on Feb. 12.

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

Talking with authors

The 35th annual Vancouver Writers Festival includes many members of the Jewish community among the more than 115 authors from across Canada and around the globe who will join the events on Granville Island and elsewhere Oct. 17-23.

The festival will celebrate the five shortlisted Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists; engage in conversations with Booker Prize-winner Douglas Stuart, as well as Canadian superstars Heather O’Neill, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Wayne Johnston. It’ll host conversations between emerging Canadian and American poets, novelists and memoirists, and feature flagship favourites like the Literary Cabaret, Sunday Brunch and Afternoon Tea.

The guest curator of this year’s festival is 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Omar El Akkad, who has invited a wide range of authors, including Noor Naga (Egypt), Elamin Abdelmahmoud (Ontario) and Threa Almontaser (United States) – and many others – to join him for six conversations that focus on home, identity and storytelling

Among the Jewish community members participating in the festival are Méira Cook, with her adult-young adult crossover novel, The Full Catastrophe, in Mecca, Mitzvah and Milestones, and in Wry Humour for Modern Life; Tilar J. Mazzeo (Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker’s Wife and Mussolini’s Daughter Outwitted the Nazis) speaks with Marsha Lederman (Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed); Sarah Leavitt facilitates a workshop led by University of British Columbia’s creative writing department; and Guy Gavriel Kay (All The Seas of the World) takes part in Fabulous Historical Fantasy.

Lederman is one of the authors participating in the The Power of Story: Live Recording for CBC’s The Next Chapter, she hosts Generational Fiction: Stories of Lineage, History and Things Passed Down, and moderates Bestseller to Blockbuster. Actor, theatre critic and UBC professor emeritus Jerry Wasserman moderates Building Suspense, on writing thrillers, and Dr. Gabor Maté talks with Globe and Mail reporter Andrea Woo about his latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

Festival tickets ($25) can be bought online at writersfest.bc.ca or at the event venue, starting 45 minutes prior to the performance. There are discounts offered for regular events to seniors (10%) and youth under 30 (50%).

– From writersfest.bc.ca

Revisiting oral histories

Manfred Gottfried and a group of men on the stairs to the Dr. Sun Yat-sen mausoleum. (photo from VHEC: RA001-5-o7-5-9-0339x)

A little over 20 years ago, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre started the Shanghai Oral History Project. Led by Roberta Kremer and Daniel Fromowitz, the project recorded the oral histories of Vancouver’s small Shanghai Jewish survivor community. They interviewed 10 survivors and/or their descendants, learning about their rich and unique experiences of survival in Shanghai.

This project, along with loaned artifacts and memorabilia, became the basis for VHEC’s 1999 exhibition Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust. It opened alongside another exhibition, Visas for Life: The Story of Feng Shan Ho. Both were well received, and included film screenings on the topic of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and a demonstration of mahjong, a game which remains popular in the Jewish community in Vancouver. Once the exhibitions concluded, materials were returned to their lenders or safely placed under the VHEC’s care, and the interviews were catalogued and filed away.

In January 2022, I began my co-op position as digital projects coordinator with the VHEC. One of the first tasks assigned to me was to help improve accessibility to the Shanghai interviews and the audiotape transcriptions. In the 20 years since these oral history transcriptions were created, the VHEC has changed its digital file management and storage system. Some files were missing while others were mislabeled. Many files would no longer open within the current version of Microsoft Word. At the top of some transcriptions was a disclaimer: “The whole tape is not transcribed, only that which is related to Shanghai.” Throughout the transcriptions, comments like “(side discussions)” denote what the original transcriber believed to be unrelated to the subject matter.

image - In 1999, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre held the exhibit Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust — In 1999, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre held the exhibit Shanghai: A Refuge During the Holocaust. (image from VHEC)

Rummaging through these transcriptions, it became apparent that I would not simply be “tidying up.” By revisiting the Shanghai Oral History Project, my goal was to do more than just emphasize the unique experiences of this small group of individuals. As I listened to their interviews and transcribed their words, I wanted to offer a glimpse into how Shanghai Jewish survivors expressed themselves and reflected on their time in Shanghai, while also highlighting things that weren’t considered when the exhibition first opened 20 years ago.

On the list of possible interviewees for the Shanghai Oral History Project, George Melcor’s was the only name with “very elderly” added beside it in parentheses. Listening to George’s interview, it became clear that this would be a challenging transcription. George sometimes mumbled, which made it difficult to comprehend his words, or he would mix up his stories. But, for 88-year-old George, Shanghai left an impression. When asked by interviewer Daniel Fromowitz what memories of Shanghai come to mind, George lit up with excitement. “Shanghai was alive all the time. Never closed, always open.… Clubs and gambling, everything was free. Shanghai was a very free city.” At this point, the slow progression of the interview sped up: the emotions in George’s voice suggest that he was reliving his 16-year-old self. For a moment, George was not elderly.

What is striking listening to the Shanghai audiotapes is the dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee. Lore Marie Wiener was interviewed about her experiences in Shanghai by both Roberta and Daniel. But rather than just giving answers, Lore proceeded to converse with both interviewers, asking about where they were born, their experiences growing up and whether they faced antisemitism. Lore was also very reflective. She questioned the nature of Jewishness and what it consists of; she questioned “… why did we not interfere in Rwanda, and we do interfere in Yugoslavia?” With the former, there was a back-and-forth between Roberta and Lore, but, with the latter, Daniel was not sure how much to engage. These side stories provide a picture of Lore that is more than just her experiences of escaping the threat of Nazi violence and survival in Shanghai; it is the continuation of her life after the Holocaust.

Lastly, how did the interviewees recall, if any, their connection to the local Chinese and Japanese communities? In general, although interviewees were in Shanghai, Chinese people featured only in the background. They were acquaintances, as was the case for Anne Chick and the two Chinese kids living in her neighbourhood. For most interviewees who did interact with Chinese people, it was through a working relationship with Chinese servants, workers or amahs.

For Lore, she employed several Chinese tailors in her shop, as well as a chauffeur and a cook called Dun-zen. Interracial relationships were also possible. Kurt Weiss noted that, after divorcing his first wife, he had a Chinese girlfriend until he left Shanghai. Gerda Gottfried Kraus mentioned in passing how, in postwar Shanghai, one of her acquaintances married a Chinese woman and wanted to bring her with him to the United States. Knowledge of some Chinese, particularly Shanghainese, was also a common theme found in these interviews, though many interviewees state that they’ve either forgotten it after not using it for so long, or knew only the absolute basics. Additionally, they never learned how to read Chinese characters.

photo - Gerda Gottfried Kraus, 1940s — Gerda Gottfried Kraus, 1940s. *(photo from VHEC: RA0001-05-00-02-0099)*

Knowledge of Japanese people was more limited. Kurt’s success as a suit salesman was due to his patron relationship with a Japanese engineer named Kato. Lore mentioned she was helped by a Japanese engineer when she and her mother were stranded in Harbin. But the one individual whom most interviewees referenced was Ghoya, the Japanese commandant of Hongkew ghetto. Ghoya developed a reputation as an unpredictable ruler: while Lore mentioned that her father and husband were treated well by Ghoya due to their academic connections, other interviewees mentioned episodes of violence committed by Ghoya and his guards against the Hongkew inhabitants. Their brutality is matched only by their treatment of the local Chinese. Most interviewees mentioned the mistreatment that local Chinese faced.

The experiences of Shanghai Jewish survivors are often overlooked when compared to those who survived in Europe. Lore was very concerned about this. At the end of her interview, she stated: “I’m not uncomfortable with anything. [But] … just try to be careful about the parts where I am too pleased with my life because there are so many people who suffered.” With the “global turn” in academic research into the Holocaust, the sub-category of “Shanghai survivor” has been gaining strength. It is a term that validates the experiences of refugee Jews and others who survived the Holocaust in Shanghai, while also acknowledging the unique circumstances and challenges they faced.

It is heartening to know that, in the 20-plus years since the VHEC’s Shanghai exhibition, research into this dimension of the Holocaust and the voices of these survivors have not been obscured, but, instead, have expanded into a vibrant subfield. By revisiting past projects and exhibitions, and making them more accessible, we can hopefully gean new information about the Holocaust and the multiplicity of survivors’ experiences.

Ryan Cheuk Him Sun is a PhD candidate in the University of British Columbia department of history. His research examines the entangled histories between Jewish refugees escaping Nazi oppression and the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore. He is also interested in the journeys that took Jewish refugees to East Asia, and their experiences in transit onboard ships and trains. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article was originally published in the VHEC’s Spring 2022 issue of Zachor.

A story of two families

Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs begins in 1919, when her father was born, on erev Yom Kippur. (photo by Ben Nelms)

In the last couple of decades, researchers have identified traits that affect many children of Holocaust survivors. There remains much left to uncover, including how much is epigenetic – that is, whether and how the genes of people like survivors, who have undergone extreme trauma, work differently than other people’s – and how much might be a result of the parenting styles of people who, in many instances, were ripped from their own parents in the most brutal circumstances. The old issue of nature versus nurture, in other words.

While psychologists and scientists try to unravel those mysteries, a genre of second generation memoirs is exploring the deeply personal experiences of being raised by survivors of the Shoah. A page-turning, sometimes shocking and nakedly vulnerable volume has recently added much to the growing library.

Vancouver journalist Marsha Lederman, Western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail, has written Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed. The book begins in 1919, when Jacob Meier Lederman was born on erev Yom Kippur. The auspicious timing of the birth of this baby, who would grow to become Marsha Lederman’s father, portended great things.

“[T]his was an occasion, an omen – a very good one, the hugest of deals,” she writes. “This person was special, he was going to be something, do something very important with his life.”

Indeed, he did. He survived the Holocaust – the only person in his immediate family to do so and one of only 10% of the Polish Jews alive in 1939 who survived to 1945.

Marsha Lederman’s mother was also a survivor, and one who participated in Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation testimony project, video-recording her Holocaust experiences. This recording would become a touchstone because, despite the journalist daughter’s career asking questions of strangers, there were many unanswered questions in the family. This was due in part to the harrowing, abrupt response to a childish inquiry about the absence of grandparents, an early lesson that unexpected answers can have catastrophic emotional impacts.

Well into adulthood, Lederman decided to visit her mother during a snowbird retreat in Florida. But instead of sitting across the kitchen table learning about her mother’s darkest moments, she was instead living one of her own – delivering her mother’s eulogy. She had waited a day too long to fly south.

Lederman’s book is the story of a family – two families, really. A family that in some ways never came together quite right, the author’s birth family with its silences about the past, and another that fell apart, that of her marriage. Kiss the Red Stairs, in fact, is a sort of applied case study in second generation (shorthanded “2G”) neuroses, as they distort the author’s reactions and coping mechanisms in a time of personal crisis.

As her marriage collapses, Lederman recognizes, on the one hand, that her responses may not be commensurate with actual events but are exacerbated by a lifetime of fears around loss and abandonment. On another hand, the undeniable anguish of her marital breakdown evokes an added burden of guilt, her own trauma juxtaposed with her parents’ experiences. Given what their mothers and fathers endured, do children of survivors have a right to feel the pain that other people seem to validly experience?

Lederman acknowledges that she was always ready for everything to fall to pieces. She inherited – or developed – an existential pessimism and a catastrophizing worldview: “The glass wasn’t just half-empty; it was half-full of poison,” she writes. “Or Zyklon B.”

The history that has formed Lederman’s identity was not imprinted on her at home only. It was in the zeitgeist of her coming-of-age as a young Canadian Jew in the 1970s and ’80s.

“The slogan ‘Never Again’ was drilled into us, implying – to me, anyway – that there was always the potential for an again, for another catastrophe. What would we do when the Nazis came back and came for us, like they came for our parents?

“This happened to us. This could happen to us again. I was one of the us. On some level I believed, from a very young age, that this could happen to me. I understood the need to be on guard, that we weren’t really safe. We needed to be on alert. Have a plan.”

For whatever were their good intentions, the organizers of a youth trip to Israel reinforced Lederman’s anxieties. Intending to instil in the participants the need for one solitary Jewish state in the world, they reminded their young charges that, in the absence of Israel, Jews would have nowhere to go should the need arise, “if the world once again turned on – or turned its back on – the Jews.”

She doesn’t disagree with the premise. “But the exercise scared the hell out of me. Don’t be so comfortable in that Canada you think of as home; you never know what could happen.”

That awareness of the unimaginable human capability for inhumanity had imprinted on her to the extent that everyday life became a gauntlet of inevitable disaster, misery the preordained endpoint of any happiness. When her marriage broke down, her reaction was extreme, “As if divorce, for instance, were some kind of death camp.”

Having consciously tried to eradicate (second-hand) Holocaust memory from its constant intrusion into her mind, Lederman finally faces the core question of her life, and of the book: “Could I possibly be a victim of the Holocaust, once removed?”

Now a mother, her obsessive worry has a new object, not only in terms of the world into which that child was born, but the potential for epigenetic inheritance. Will the baggage of the past be passed along to another descendant of survivors?

At the same time, Lederman is careful not to ascribe her challenges to the overburdened couple who raised her.

“I am not comfortable blaming what happened to my parents – and, in effect, blaming them – for my little problems. It feels self-indulgent, unfair and actually untrue,” she writes. What they accomplished after the war was almost as miraculous as their survival during it. “The fact that after such tragedy my parents were able to build new lives – purchase and set up a home, go to night school to learn English, buy a business, raise children – seems astonishing to me, as I contemplate it all as an adult. How on earth did they manage to do it, manage to be so normal?”

She quotes Elie Wiesel who, in 1984, told children of Holocaust survivors: “That your parents were not seized by an irrepressible anger … remains a source of astonishment to me. Had they set fire to the entire planet, it would not have surprised anyone.”

Elsewhere in Lederman’s book, Wiesel appears again, seemingly underscoring the legitimacy of second generation complexes by noting that it was they, not their parents, who were the ultimate target of Hitler’s plan.

“You were the enemy’s obsessions,” Wiesel told the children of survivors. “In murdering living Jews, he wished to prevent you from being born.”

Lederman confronts the reader with things she has learned from research, rather than from firsthand experience or from stories her parents shared (because they didn’t). The Holocaust experiences of her parents may be the impetus for her lifelong sense of danger, she seems to suggest, but the larger history of that era should be a warning shot for all humans – because it was humans who perpetrated everything that happened to her parents and to the millions of others of the Nazis’ victims.

In one of several graphic segments, she demands that the reader ponder how ordinary people could throw babies in the air and practise a merciless form of skeet shooting.

There are other psychological conundrums in the book. Reading her father’s journal of a trip back to Europe, Lederman confronts what reads like a cognitive rupture: her father’s love for and comparatively happy memories of Germany.

Rather than remain in Nazi-occupied Poland, young Jacob audaciously crossed into the belly of the beast, into Germany, posing as a Polish peasant boy, and got work as a farmhand, surviving until the end of the war. As a result, he took a perversely positive view. In a travel diary entry, he wrote, “I had a wonderful exciting day and my motto stands again forever: I will never forget you Germany and the peace and security I found here among these fields, meadows and trees in those murderous inhuman times of the year 1942.”

Of all the happenstances in the book – some life-altering and, in several instances, life-saving – there is a particularly poignant one that happened on her father’s trip back to his hometown. On that trip, her father found out that his parents had left a letter for him before they had been evacuated from the ghetto and shortly thereafter murdered.

“A Polish woman who lived there at the time, or moved in after the liquidation – I’m not sure which – had come into possession of that letter. There were photos in this packet and some other family keepsakes,” she writes. “The woman said she had held onto these items for a long time, but after so many years without word, she lost all hope that my father had survived; she figured nobody from the family had. She threw the packet away.

“What was that like for him – to learn that his parents had left him something: a declaration of their love, a wish for his future, some unknown secret, an explanation of what was happening to them? And to learn that those things once touched and left for him by his parents – a written document, photographs, who knows what else – proof that his parents had existed, evidence of their love – had survived, only to be discarded?”

On her own ventures to the blood-soaked continent, Lederman is reminded that the past has not passed. She sees antisemitic graffiti on abandoned synagogues, Polish youths giving obscene gestures to participants during the March of the Living. Lederman and four family members are paying tribute at a Holocaust memorial while a group of boys nearby chant something in Polish, something menacing that included one term she recognized: “Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

“It didn’t sound like they were expressing their condolences,” she writes.

After a lifetime of mostly solitary rumination and fears, Lederman has several epiphanies during the World Federation of Child Survivors of the Holocaust annual conference, held in 2019 in Vancouver. Here, she finds others who share her view that “the other shoe is always about to drop and the world is not safe”; “being plagued with obsessive doubt”; “a heightened ability – one might call it a curse – to observe and engage others”; “A constant expectation that someone is going to get you.”

There, she finds she is not alone.

“I had found my people,” she writes.

Enhanced care for survivors

Jewish Family Services (JFS) and Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) have formed a new partnership to serve Greater Vancouver’s Holocaust survivor community.

Beginning last month, JFS is now administering both the socialization and social services Claims Conference grants, which have traditionally been split between the two organizations. This move consolidates the work of managing and reporting the grant within JFS, streamlining the administrative process, while preserving the delivery of socialization programs through the VHEC.

Holocaust survivor socialization programs include four to six events every year, as well as regular group meeting for Russian-speaking and child Holocaust survivors. Preserving the services at the VHEC means that survivors will continue to access these programs without disruption, as well as maintain their ownership over what the programs entail.

This organizational partnership will also include a JFS case manager on-site at the VHEC one day a week, increasing access to JFS social services and resources among the survivor population. Case management and assistance with Claims Conference applications will continue to be available through the VHEC.

Cindy McMillan, JFS director of programs and community partnerships, said, “JFS and VHEC have always had a close working relationship and we’re very excited for this opportunity to enhance supports in the community. It means that our resources can spread more naturally across the survivor population as we work together to ensure Holocaust survivors are able to age at home safely and with dignity.”

“As a museum founded by Holocaust survivors, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre prides itself in being considered a second home to many in our survivor community,” added Nina Krieger, VHEC executive director. “Through strengthening our partnership with JFS, we are very pleased to streamline the administration of survivor services in our community, ensuring that survivors continue to access supports at the VHEC, while enjoying thriving socialization programs such as the child survivor and Russian-speaking survivor groups via the centre.”

The Claims Conference grants are specifically for organizations that assist Jewish victims of Nazism and projects that promote research, education and documentation of the Shoah. Grants are given to social service agencies worldwide that provide vital services for Holocaust survivors, such as home care, food and medicine.

– Courtesy Jewish Family Services and Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre

Supporting Jews worldwide

Michelle Pollock, chair of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Israel and global engagement committee. (photo from JFGV)

For Montreal native Michelle Pollock, chair of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Israel and global engagement committee (IGEC), love and loyalty to world Jewry were firmly established early in life – at home, school and in the community at large.

That deep affinity was further solidified after a two-month trip to Israel with her ninth-grade class. More recently, while serving as president of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in 2016, Pollock took a trip with her husband Neil to visit the Krakow and Moscow JCCs.

“These visits were incredibly powerful,” Pollock told the Independent. “Witnessing the young adults of these communities, discovering and exploring their Jewish heritage was beautiful. Even more inspiring was the hard work and dedication of the Polish and Russian volunteers and staff in creating welcoming spaces to facilitate this Jewish self-discovery.”

In November 2017, Pollock traveled to northern Israel as a participant on a Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs mission. “Many of the participants on the trip were IGEC members or staff and their passion for our partnership region was infectious. I joined the IGEC soon thereafter,” she said.

A visit to Federation’s partnership region, Etzba HaGalil (the Galilee Panhandle), followed, in November 2019. That experience was multifaceted. The area is known for its physical beauty and the warmth of its residents, said Pollock, but the harsh reality of security issues and the regional challenges of jobs, infrastructure and opportunity also prevail, she noted.

“Seeing this firsthand infused me with gratitude to our Federation, which has worked so closely with the region since the mid-1990s to bring desperately needed aid and programming in a continuing effort to address the challenges faced by its residents,” Pollock said. “Jewish Federation has strategically invested funds to strengthen this region through education and social welfare programs, capital projects and regional development, and building enduring relationships between members of our community and residents of Etzba HaGalil.”

Similar to efforts locally, some of the funds to Israel have been allocated to new programs addressing youth mental health issues, violence and abuse at home, educational gaps and food security – all problems that have been compounded by the pandemic.

As for the challenges in another region in need, Far East Russia, where many Jews live in remote locations, Federation partners with the Joint Distribution Committee. The JDC is a global organization that addresses critical rescue and relief needs in more than 60 countries, including in the former Soviet Union (FSU).

“Working together with the JDC, life-saving aid is provided to over 80,000 elderly Jewish people in the former Soviet Union who struggle to survive on meagre pensions of $2 per day. They are the poorest Jews in the world, most without family or government support. Their distress and vulnerability are exacerbated by the region’s remoteness and freezing winters,” Pollock explained.

Many of these elderly Jews are well-educated and trained as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators, she said. Having spent most of their working lives under communism, however, they were unable to accumulate savings. When the Soviet Union collapsed, along with the region’s pension and social assistance infrastructure, they were left poverty-stricken.

“Vancouver is geographically the nearest Jewish community to the Jewish communities in the easternmost part of Russia, adjacent to Siberia. As a strategic priority to strengthen Jewish life around the world, Jewish Federation (as the closest Federation) plays a very active role in supporting this region,” Pollock said. “We ensure long-term economic and social stability for Jews living overseas and in Israel by funding much-needed programs that provide a safety net for our most vulnerable people.”

These specialized programs, funded in part by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver through the annual campaign, impact the lives of at-risk youth, low-income seniors and those living in economically fragile areas.

This year, Federation is funding a program directed at youth in the FSU called Active Jewish Teen (AJT). Engagement in the Jewish community, it believes, is an essential first step in making communal responsibility an inseparable part of one’s Jewish identity. Though still building momentum, AJT already has more than 3,200 members in 63 locations across seven countries.

Besides investing strategically, Federation’s IGEC has made solid connections with the groups it is serving in the FSU, said Pollock. It is also attentive to urgent needs arising in other Jewish communities around the world, helping fund operations and campaigns in South America, Ethiopia, the United States and elsewhere, she said.

Closer to home, throughout the year, Jewish Federation’s Israel and global engagement department brings opportunities for the Vancouver community to experience Israeli culture. Next year’s Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’atzmaut will present opportunities for the community to come together in person.

“Building off the success of last year’s virtual Israeli Independence Day celebration, we will include more local talents and have community fun projects such as the community song and more surprises,” said Pollock, adding that there is a contingency plan in place should the COVID situation change.

Further, shinshinim, teenage emissaries from Israel, will be in town in the coming year. The shinshinim engage local young people in various activities and help foster meaningful ties between Disapora Jews and Israel.

Members of the Vancouver community have a chance to travel to Israel next summer, as well. Federation is facilitating a community mission from July 24 to Aug. 5, 2022.

“I know many of us are keen to travel and get back to Israel and this is going to be an amazing experience,” said Pollock. “At this point, we are looking for people to register their interest and there are a number of information sessions coming up.”

To learn more about the trip to Israel and to donate to the annual campaign, visit jewishvancouver.com.

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

New exhibit at Uvic

Dr. Helga Thorson of the University of Victoria. (photo from uvic.ca)

The University of Victoria unveiled its Stories of the Holocaust: Local Memory and Transmission exhibit – a project that was part of a combined undergraduate and graduate seminar on Holocaust and memory studies – during an online launch on April 15.

The exhibit is the result of a collaborative effort. Ten community members, comprising Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors, from Vancouver, Victoria and Salt Spring Island, were paired with 10 UVic students to present wide-ranging and diverse stories from the Shoah in a context both personal and relevant to future Holocaust education.

“Students worked one-on-one with a community partner to figure out the best way to tell each story. This, as they discovered, was no easy task,” said UVic professor Dr. Helga Thorson, the course’s instructor. The students had to learn new technological skills, go over an extensive reading list and develop interpersonal skills, which included “relationship-building and the ethical dilemmas that come into play when telling somebody’s story that is not your own.”

“The engagement and involvement of the 10 students, who took the class assignment seriously, will go a long way in helping us remember the Shoah and the story passed on by their community partner,” said Thorson. “Remembering the past also helps us reflect on the present and what this means for us in today’s world as we continue to grapple with antisemitism, racism and other forms of violence, hatred and injustice.”

Ireland Good, one of the students involved in the project, thanked the Jewish community members for “their courage and their trust in us to tell their stories and to create this exhibit. I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience,” said Good, “even with its low moments, as I am sure it is with all the other students.”

The stories represent varied experiences, including having hid in order to survive and having been sent to a Soviet gulag. They come from Hinda Avery, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Rudolf Deman, Ilserl Fränkel, Julius Maslovat, Micha Menczer, Isa Milman, Fred Preuss, Claire Sicherman and Hester Waas.

Maslovat was the youngest prisoner ever at Buchenwald, and he is the subject of a recent film, Why Am I Here?: A Child’s Journey Through the Holocaust. The day of the launch, April 15, had a special significance for Maslovat, as it marked the 76th anniversary of his liberation from Bergen-Belsen. He was just under 3 years old at the time.

“My story did not come to me in a neat package. There were people who knew parts of it and contributed. Other parts I had to dig out of archives in Israel, Germany, Sweden, Britain, Poland, U.S. and Finland. I have tried to tell my story by putting together the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. This time, I have included material I have not spoken about before,” said Maslovat, explaining his contribution to the archive.

“Despite what people may think about Holocaust survivors writing their memoir or speaking about their experience, we are not navel-gazing,” said writer Boraks-Nemetz, who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and lived in hiding. “We who have stared into the abyss of the atrocity that was the Shoah can never erase it from our memories. When I speak about my experience, I always think of the survivors and the victims, of the injustice wrought by a madman who destroyed lives – lives of children, of my little 5-year-old sister, who was brutally murdered for being a Jewish child … of the 1.5 million children who needlessly died.”

Boraks-Nemetz continues to explore the personal and broader impacts of the Holocaust through recent works, the novel Mouth of Truth and a collection of poetry, Out of the Dark.

Dr. Richard Kool is the son of Waas, who hid in the Netherlands during the war. He spoke of the importance of conveying the story to future generations. “I’ve really understood that, as Hester’s child and the oldest of my siblings, I have a responsibility as a carrier of a message that helps me keep looking forward towards recipients, towards recipients who have more life in front of them than behind, recipients who may not even be alive yet,” he said.

“We, the survivors and their children, must look forward and consider the powerful message for future individuals and generations,” he added. “Messages that say, ‘Don’t wallow in despair, worry and victimhood, but act, now, to do what you can with the tools at your disposal and the people around you to help co-create a fairer, healthier, more just, more peaceful community and society.’”

To view the exhibit, go to omekas.library.uvic.ca.

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

Shoah education continues

Dr. Claude Romney speaking to students pre-COVID. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

For many years, people dedicated to educating about the Holocaust and its moral lessons have been adapting to new realities. The declining number of survivors and the need to preserve their eyewitness testimony has necessitated innovative means of conveying these lessons to successive generations. As a result of these preparations, organizations like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) have been remarkably prepared to continue their work despite the limitations imposed by a global pandemic.

Dr. Claude Romney has been sharing her wartime experiences with younger audiences for several years. Her father, Dr. Jacques Lewin, was arrested in Paris at the end of 1941 and was among the first prisoners transported to Auschwitz. While Romney and her mother survived the war in southern France, evading numerous close calls, her father survived the most notorious Nazi camp because his skills were useful to the Nazis – he was a doctor who was put into service at the camp. Romney has researched and spoken about the experiences of her father and other “prisoner-doctors.”

Since the pandemic began, Romney has done two virtual presentations to schools and, while she wishes the talks could be in person, she is grateful that the technology exists to allow them to happen at all.

“I personally, and I think the other survivors who continue to talk to students online, have to be grateful both to the [Vancouver] Holocaust Education Centre and, of course, most of all, to the teachers who still get in touch and haven’t given up,” she said. “It’s something which could easily have fallen by the wayside. I think it’s very fortunate that teachers are dedicated enough to continue.”

A year and counting into the pandemic, Romney said the global upheaval could have led to lost opportunities.

“We feel there is some urgency because we’re not getting any younger,” she said. “It’s very important.”

The online events differ, depending on the audience. Some classes that are still meeting in person are set up so that the speaker sees the teacher but not the entire class. When classes are virtual, the speaker is one of many faces on a Zoom call.

“This would never have been possible for students 15 years ago, 10 years ago maybe even,” Romney said. “It makes a big difference because, of course, there are books and articles, but it’s not the same as hearing somebody tell their personal stories.”

While the survivor speakers are talking about their past, the lessons they aim to impart are for the present and future.

“I think it’s vital that the new generations know about what happened because it’s up to them to prevent this kind of thing from happening again,” she said. “And to understand that it’s vital to be tolerant of other people who may be different in some ways because they come from different cultures, different religions. It’s a cautionary tale really.”

Ashley Ross has been teaching a course in genocide studies at Aldergrove Community Secondary School for four years. She can attest that students make connections between the present and the past – and that relevance has been honed more sharply in the past couple of years.

“When I first started teaching it, it was very hard for them to understand the German context of that era,” she said, noting that she was challenged to demonstrate the “slippery slope” of hatred, fear and scapegoating. Sadly, students understand that phenomenon better than just a few years ago. “Right now, they are immediately seeing connections and understanding and seeing it play out in their current world.… More than ever, the lessons of the power of propaganda and the fear and the scapegoating are really resonating in our world. It’s through those historical lessons that we are better equipped to process what we’re currently facing.”

She maintains that the survivor speakers’ virtual events are every bit as powerful on the students as an in-person one. She even sees a benefit in the fact that, when they know they can’t be seen by the speaker, students may be more open with their emotional responses.

“Because the Holocaust survivor is only looking at my face rather than their faces, I find that it’s often more raw for the students. In a large auditorium, it doesn’t have that same personal impact,” said Ross, who has led a student trip to Europe that included a visit to Auschwitz.

Sharing firsthand accounts with young generations puts a human face to a part of history that is enormous in scope and perhaps remote in time from the perspective of a teenager.

“I think there’s a sense of honour to have a direct connection to this history that sometimes feels so far away,” she said. “It’s a reminder that it isn’t so far away. I think it’s really impactful to hear first-person accounts [about] something that can get so bogged down in huge numbers.”

photo - Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre — Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. *(photo from vhec.org)*

Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the VHEC, acknowledges that her team did not know what to expect when the pandemic began a year ago. At the same time, the remote delivery of programs and resources that was necessary due to COVID was something for which the centre was already prepared. Not only were Holocaust survivors and other educators delivering virtual talks to student groups in remote parts of British Columbia, a vast digitization process over the past several years has made much of the centre’s collections accessible online, including artifacts, documents, written testimonies and videos.

“In a way, that’s nothing new for us,” she said.

Some research requests saw an uptick as teachers encouraged students to undertake individualized projects – and because the revised provincial curriculum also emphasizes “self-directed learning.”

The VHEC also saw an increase in donations of artifacts and documents. This may be because people are spending more time at home and deciding to clean out attics and closets. Shulman Spaar also thinks people may have a little more time to read the communications they send to supporters, which often include appeals for family records and other items.

Echoing the Aldergrove teacher, Shulman Spaar thinks another factor for increased interest in the VHEC’s programs and resources may be due to current events. Political situations in the United States and around the world, the increased awareness of violence against minority communities and other topics in the news daily underscore the relevance of the organization’s work.

“Ultimately, we are an anti-racism-based Holocaust education centre,” she said. “If you look at what’s going on, it does seem very relevant at the moment.”

There were challenges in rapidly scaling the delivery of virtual programs to more groups. Docents, educators and survivor speakers had to learn the new technologies and adapt their messages to the medium.

Conversely, there have been silver linings. Some survivors who, for health or mobility reasons, could not present their testimonies in person have been able to do so virtually. As capacity has grown for delivering programs remotely, so have requests. The VHEC has welcomed invitations from other provinces, as well as schools in northern British Columbia and other remote parts of the province where survivors are unlikely to visit.

Moreover, said Shulman Spaar, some participants have commented that seeing survivors in their own homes, rather than on a stage, is unexpectedly powerful.

“It’s not the same as an in-person encounter,” she acknowledged, “but, also, hearing the speaker speaking from her or his living room, it’s a different intimate situation that happens. Yes, there is this screen still, but some students and teachers comment how they feel very close and it feels like an intimate encounter rather than being in a big hall and on a stage.

“It’s just different,” she said.

A moving documentary

A scene from the documentary Martha, in which director Daniel Schubert is given a more appropriate shirt by his grandmother, Martha Katz. (Courtesy NFB)

Two very different scenes in the National Film Board of Canada’s short documentary film Martha – which will be released on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27 – combine to highlight the joy and pain that is life. Directed and co-written by Daniel Schubert, a grandson of the film’s subject, Martha Katz, there is a funny and relatable interaction where his grandmother questions his choice of shirt for the filming and provides him with a more appropriate one. This lighthearted exchange contrasts with the heart-wrenching tour that Katz takes with her grandson through the Holocaust Museum LA.

Born in Berehove, Czechoslovakia, Katz is 14 years old when she’s taken to the ghetto, then to Auschwitz. Both of her parents and two of her brothers were murdered in the Holocaust; she, along with two other brothers and two sisters, survived the concentration camps. She speaks, with emotions near the surface, about some of her experiences. The documentary is a mix of seemingly spontaneous moments, while other parts are scripted reenactments or prepared questions being asked and answered.

“My original idea for the documentary,” Schubert told the Independent, “was to track Martha and her two sisters’ incredible journey together through the ghettos and, eventually, Auschwitz. After Auschwitz, they were even forced to work at a German bomb factory together in Allendorf, manufacturing the bombs. The fact that Martha and her two sisters managed to stay together and survive through all of the horrors of the concentration camps, to me, was a miracle. I thought that would make an amazing documentary.

“But, as we developed it at the NFB, we realized that a more traditional cinéma vérité documentary could be a viable way to tell her story, too. I did not know many of the facts beforehand, so many of the things she told me in the film came as a surprise. My grandmother and I have a warm and loving relationship and I thought, why not show that on screen as I find out all of these amazing things?

“The other thing about my grandmother,” added Schubert, “is she’s hilarious. She’s the classic Jewish grandmother and I wanted that to come across. I wanted this to also be a real picture of a grandmother and her grandson and how we naturally interact.

“We also decided that in between these cinéma vérité moments would be cinematic vignettes narrated by my grandmother herself. There were many more amazing things she went through, but, due to time constraints, I picked those stories.”

One of the stories is how, after the war, in Vienna, his grandmother met and married Bill Katz, who had been in a labour camp. The couple went to Winnipeg, with $200 they had saved up. They had two children – Jack and Sharon – and struggled financially. It was his grandmother who suggested they go into business for themselves. She went to night school, then saw an ad for a grocery store for sale – she bought it, learning on the job. There are some wonderful photos and video in this part of the film.

photo - Martha Katz saw an ad for a grocery store for sale – she bought it, learning on the job — Martha Katz saw an ad for a grocery store for sale – she bought it, learning on the job. *(photo from NFB)*

It was her goal in life for her two children to have whatever they wanted and she talks about her happiness at having had them. “We had to have a life again,” she says, stressing that this doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about the Holocaust all the time, because she does – “I hope it should never happen again. That’s all.”

“Bringing her to the museum was a bit of a tough decision, but she encouraged us to go,” said Schubert. “The intention was to see whether there was anything new that she and I could both learn about the atrocities committed. And, as it turned out in the film, there was; specifically, about the excruciating length of time the gas chamber took, in some cases, to exterminate those poor victims trapped inside, including my great-grandmother and her young son. Suffice to say, it took way longer than expected, and neither of us knew how long they may have had to suffer inside.”

It was for health reasons that Katz, who is now 90 years old, moved to Los Angeles.

“My grandmother suffered from chronic bronchitis since the war and, because of Winnipeg’s frigid winters, the doctors advised her to move somewhere warmer, or else her life could be at risk,” explained Schubert. “My grandfather’s brother lived in Los Angeles, so they helped them get settled there. They came to Winnipeg from Europe in 1948 and moved to Los Angeles in 1964.”

The 22-minute documentary is dedicated to the memory of Katz’s older sister, Rose Benovich. The statement at the film’s end notes: “Her courage in Auschwitz is the reason I am alive today.”

Justice slams the UN

On Dec. 9, the Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, delivered the inaugural Elie Wiesel Lectureship in Human Rights. (photo by Philippe Landreville)

The Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, last week delivered an emotional, scathing indictment of the world’s failures to live up to the promise of post-Holocaust human rights protections.

Abella, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who herself was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, in 1946, delivered the inaugural Elie Wiesel Lectureship in Human Rights. She spoke Dec. 9 on the 72nd anniversary of the United Nations’ adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the day before the 72nd anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The promise of those documents – and the justice represented by the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals – has been betrayed and ignored, she said.

“These were the powerful legal symbols of a world shamefully chastened,” Abella said in the streamed virtual presentation. “But although Nuremberg represented a sincere commitment to justice, it was a commitment all too fleeting.”

As the West’s triumph over fascism gave way to conflict with communism, Germany transformed in the diplomatic imagination from an enemy conquered to a potential ally to be wooed, she said. Britain issued a communiqué to all Commonwealth countries to abandon prosecutions of Nazi war criminals.

“The past was tucked away and the moral comfort of the Nuremberg trials gave way to the moral expedient of the Cold War,” Abella said.

As the fight against communism eclipsed the fight for justice over past crimes, expedience led Western countries to welcome Nazi scientists and others to contribute to the military-industrial strategy – even as Jewish victims of Nazism, like Abella and her parents, sat stateless in DP camps.

To Abella, Nuremberg represented an acknowledgement of the failure of Western democracies to respond when they should have and could have.

“And so, the vitriolic language and venal rights abuses unrestrained by anyone’s conscience anywhere in or out of Germany turned into the ultimate rights abuse: genocide,” she said.

Some justice did in fact emerge in the aftermath of Nuremberg and remarkable progress has been made in some quarters, she said. “But we still have not learned the most important lesson of all – to try to prevent the abuses in the first place. All over the world, in the name of religion, domestic sovereignty, national interest, economic exigency or sheer arrogance, men, women and children are being slaughtered, abused, imprisoned, terrorized and exploited with impunity.… No national abuser seems to worry whether there will be a Nuremberg trial later because usually there isn’t. And, in any event, by the time there is, all the damage that was sought to be done has been done.”

Abella reflected on the preoccupation among jurists with the rule of law, noting that the atrocities of the Nazi era all took place legally under German laws. She said we should be focused on “the rule of justice, not just the rule of law.”

Itemizing the myriad genocides that have occurred since 1945, including ones happening now, Abella decried a lack of global will to confront atrocities before they occur.

“Clearly what remains elusive is our willingness as an international community to protect humanity from injustice,” she said, launching a broadside against the failures of the United Nations.

“It can hardly be said to have been the avatar of human rights we hoped it would be when it was created,” she said. “We changed the world’s institutions and laws after World War II because they had lost their legitimacy and integrity. Are we there again? Not so much because our human rights laws need changing, but because a good argument can be made that our existing global institutions, and especially the UN’s deliberative role, are playing fast and loose with their legitimacy and our integrity.”

She acknowledged the successes of some UN agencies, such as UNICEF, but lamented the body’s failures to meet its core objectives.

“The UN had four objectives: to protect future generations from war, to guard human rights, to foster universal justice and to promote social progress,” she said. “Since then, 40 million people have died as a result of conflicts all over the world. The UN eventually reacted in Libya and wagged its finger at Syria, but I waited in vain to wait to hear what it had to say about Iran, Venezuela and China, for example. Isn’t that magisterial silence a thunderous answer to those who say things would be a lot worse without the UN? Worse how? I know it’s all we have but does that mean it’s the best we can do? Nations debate, people die. Nations dissemble, people die. Nations defy, people die. We need more than the words and laws of justice. We need justice.”

Abella acknowledged the need to address climate change but suggested a moral climate crisis is upon us.

“We have to worry not only about how the climate is changing the world but how the moral climate is creating an atmosphere polluted by bombastic anti-intellectualism, sanctimonious incivility and a moral free-for-all,” she said. “Everyone is talking and no one is listening. We are rolling back hard-fought human rights for minorities, immigrants, refugees, workers and women.

Abella approached global justice through the eyes of a single family. Her parents were married in Poland on Sept. 3, 1939, the day the Nazis rolled over the border and as the Second World War began. Her parents spent four years in concentration camps. The brother she never knew was murdered at the age of two-and-a-half. The only survivors of her extended family were her parents and one grandmother.

“My life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, no justice,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure. “No one with this history does not feel lucky to be alive and free. No one with this history takes anything for granted and no one with this history does not feel that those of us who are alive have a duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents, a world where all children regardless of race, colour, religion or gender can wear their identities with dignity, with pride and in peace.”

Her own existence is a statement of the resilience of human hopefulness, she said.

“In an act that seems to me to be almost incomprehensible in its breathtaking optimism, my parents and thousands of other survivors transcended the inhumanity they had experienced and decided to have more children,” she said. “I think it was a way to fix their hearts and prove to themselves and the world that their spirits were not broken.”

Abella dedicated her lecture not only to Elie Wiesel, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but also to Irwin Cotler, who introduced her prior to her presentation and who Abella called Wiesel’s “spiritual heir.”

Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister, is the founder and chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which sponsored the lecture along with faculties of law at McGill University and the Université de Montréal, the Lord Reading Law Society and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute.

Cotler, who last month was appointed Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, noted that Abella was the youngest person ever appointed to the Canadian judiciary, at age 29.

“She was the first refugee ever appointed to the judiciary and she was the first Jewish woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada,” Cotler said, noting that he was the justice minister who nominated her to the highest court. “She has been a remarkable trailblazer. A quintessential Renaissance jurist, public intellectual, educator and judge.”

Among Abella’s recognitions, Cotler noted, are 39 honorary doctorates.

To watch the lecture, click here.