Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program

The path of young Stanley's life takes an abrupt turn when Nazi Germany invades Poland in September 1939. Growing up in Jaslo in southeastern Poland, Stanley helps his parents sell goods at the market, plays with friends in the river and goes to school with his sisters. But when the German soldiers arrive with their new rules for the town's Jews, who are eventually forced to live crammed into a small ghetto in one pocket of the city, Stanley is left bewildered at what his life has become. His path to survival finds him bravely - or foolishly - sneaking into and out of ghettos and Nazi camps. To Stanley, moving from one ghetto to another, from forced labour camp to concentration camp, it's only by luck that he avoids the mass deportations to Belzec and other death camps, where arrival means death. From the infamous Plaszow camp to finally being liberated from Buchenwald, Stanley makes his way through the surprising and terror-filled Path That Luck Took.

As a young teenager in Oradea, Romania, Hedy Bohm leads a sheltered life, oblivious to the events of World War II and the Holocaust. When Nazi Germany occupies Hungary in 1944, Hedy still feels relatively safe, even when she and her parents are forced into an overcrowded ghetto and then taken away in cattle cars. It is only when Hedy arrives in Auschwitz-Birkenau that she comes face-to-face with the bewildering and devastating reality of the Holocaust. But Hedy is determined to survive and reunite with her mother. Now totally alone, she finds within herself a resourcefulness and strength she didn't know she had.

From the bustling city of Paris to the quaint, countryside village of Champlost, France, Where Courage Lives follows ten-year-old Muguette Szpajzer and her family as they seek refuge from the war. Written in vignettes with child-like charm and innocence, Muguette's memoir provides rich insight into rural life during wartime upheaval, honouring both her indomitable mother and the courage of the people of Champlost.

As the German army invades his hometown in Poland, young Moishe Kantorowitz decides to mentally record everything he sees. In this movingly descriptive and devastating portrayal of prewar Jewish life and its destruction during the Holocaust, Moishe bears witness to incomprehensible cruelties and to the lives and communities that are rapidly wiped out by the Nazis. Moishe's entire family is murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Moishe, selected to live, endures brutal treatment and constant hunger, his survival now dependent on the whims of his overseers and small acts of generosity that bring him back from the brink of death.

When the Nazis invade Budapest in 1944, Margit Kassai begins to document her life in a diary in the form of a letter to her husband, who has been sent to do forced labour. With wry self-deprecation, dark humour and an incredible attention to detail, Margit describes the persecution of Jews and how she feels working in children's homes and living under a false identity. Even as bombs fall around her, she braves the streets to find food for the children in her care, writing unflinchingly of the suffering she endures and her determination to see her husband again.

It is the summer of 1941, and Malka is ten years old. Her small town of Romanov, Ukraine, has just been occupied by the Nazis, and Malka's Jewish traditions, culture and community are under attack. Malka and her mother manage to escape, hiding in fields, forests and haylofts as danger forces them to continue moving. As Malka relies on her faith and instincts to keep herself and her mother alive, she finds them refuge with strangers who become like family along the way.

Mariette is only five years old when the Nazis invade her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, in 1940. Soon her family is torn apart, and Mariette and her siblings are scattered across the city and countryside, hiding with non-Jews and in convents and orphanages or working for the resistance. Seeing violence and death all around her, Mariette learns the skills she needs to survive - how to throw a knife, jump from a moving vehicle and, most importantly, stay silent. Mariette emerges from the war quick-thinking, fiercely independent and ready to start a new life in Canada. As she navigates a transition to a new identity as Marie - an industrious and resourceful community member, mother and advocate for children's rights - Mariette, the silent child, begins to find her voice.

Salomon Buch a 17 ans et vit dans le quartier juif de Belleville, à Paris, avec ses soeurs et ses parents lorsque les Allemands envahissent la France en 1940; les Buch se retrouvent désormais en zone occupée. En 1941, le père est arrêté lors de la rafle du Billet vert et retenu prisonnier à Beaune-la-Rolande. Sur les conseils de ce dernier, Salomon fuit à Lyon, en zone libre, mais la tragédie frappe le 16 juillet 1942, quand la rafle du Vél d'Hiv emporte le reste de la famille, à l'exception de Denise, l'aînée de ses soeurs. Seule, elle tente de les faire libérer, en vain : toutes seront déportées et aucune ne reviendra. Impuissant devant le désastre, Salomon parvient à convaincre Denise de le rejoindre. Ensemble, ils survivront à la guerre et reconstruiront leurs vies respectives, liés à jamais par un drame commun et portés par la force de leur serment à la vie.

In France, underground networks find refuge for eleven-year-old Eva Lang and her younger sisters, protecting them from internment camps. In an orphanage in Slovakia, a pastor shelters young David Korn and his older brother, saving them from deportation. In a village in Poland, a farmer hides nine-year-old Fishel Philip Goldig and his parents after they escape from a ghetto and certain death. When so many people stood by during the anti-Jewish atrocities of the Holocaust, others risked their lives to save their Jewish friends and neighbours, and often even strangers. The three feature memoirs in At Great Risk are accompanied by excerpted stories of rescue by thirteen previously published Azrieli Foundation authors, highlighting the diverse experiences of rescue during the Holocaust. Together, these stories emphasize not only the courage and moral strength of the rescuers but also the survivors' remembrances of and gratitude to their rescuers after the war.

Two Jewish girls born six months apart - Judy Abrams in Hungary and Eva Felsenburg Marx in Czechoslovakia - are only children when they are thrown into the turmoil and terror of World War II. At seven, Judy's mother leaves her at a convent where she must adopt a new Christian identity. Eva is first sent away at two, then again at six, in disguise and tearful. Separated from their parents, forced to "pass" as Christian children, coping with dangers they barely understand, these evocative and lyrical memoirs describe childhoods irrevocably marked by the Holocaust. Tenuous Threads and One of the Lucky Ones tell us the parallel but unique stories of two children who were able to survive when so many others perished.

Mariette is only five years old when the Nazis invade her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, in 1940. Soon her family is torn apart, and Mariette and her siblings are scattered across the city and countryside, hiding with non-Jews and in convents and orphanages or working for the resistance. Seeing violence and death all around her, Mariette learns the skills she needs to survive - how to throw a knife, jump from a moving vehicle and, most importantly, stay silent. Mariette emerges from the war quick-thinking, fiercely independent and ready to start a new life in Canada. As she navigates a transition to a new identity as Marie - an industrious and resourceful community member, mother and advocate for children's rights - Mariette, the silent child, begins to find her voice.

"Goodbye, children! Go, and don't look back...." Two little girls, Marguerite and her older sister, Henriette, hear these last words from their mother and know that they must forget everything that is familiar about their former lives in Paris. With new Catholic identities, the sisters are taken from farm to farm and convent to convent where they learn how to remain silent, how to pretend, how to lie in order to survive. Beautifully illustrated by the author, In Hiding offers us rare and poignant insight into a young child's view of her world at war.

Ben Carniol is only five years old in 1942 when his parents send him away to live with a non-Jewish couple in the village of Baudour, Belgium. Hide and Seek: In Pursuit of Justice describes a childhood filled with the loss and violence of war and Ben's response to it: a deep lifelong commitment to creating a safe and just society for all.

Stefan grows up in Warsaw, Poland, barely aware he is Jewish and part of a small, assimilated community steeped in Polish culture. But in 1939, Nazi Germany occupies Poland, and Stefan suffers the same fate as the rest of the Jewish community when he is forced into the Warsaw ghetto. At risk of deportation to the Treblinka death camp, Stefan manages to escape the ghetto and go into hiding, isolated and in constant danger. In A Symphony of Remembrance, Stefan Carter sounds an urgent call to learn from the past, acknowledge ongoing human suffering and create a more just future.

Jack Klajman is only nine years old when the ghetto walls go up in Warsaw. The Smallest Hope is his powerful memoir recounting how he survived by smuggling food from outside the ghetto, and by hiding in a war-torn city among Nazi soldiers. Witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest act of Jewish resistance during World War II, Jack escapes only through a combination of bravery and luck.

Margalith and her older sister, Dorica, grow up in a warm, close-knit family in Romania, but at a young age, the girls tragically lose their mother. Just as they are readjusting to a new family life, their childhood abruptly comes to a brutal end - Romania aligns itself with Nazi Germany and antisemitism boils over in their community. In 1941, Romanian soldiers force Margalith and her family from their home and send them on a devastating deportation march to the unknown. Crossing a river takes Margalith into Transnistria, a wretched land between borders, an expanse of thousands of kilometres containing more than a hundred ghettos and camps. This area, controlled by Romania, is where Jews like Margalith and her family are abandoned, left to die in desolation. A ghetto in the town of Murafa provides a bleak shelter where Margalith and her family struggle to keep starvation at bay until help arrives unexpectedly before war's end. Her journey to freedom and a new homeland provides both opportunity and heartache, and Margalith finds A Light in the Clouds as she endures the darkness of her past to search out the bright future ahead.

As seventeen-year-old Sonia prepares to leave her childhood home in Tarnów, Poland, to study journalism in Paris, antisemitism is on the rise. It is the spring of 1939, and her father is leaving for Canada to set up a new life there for his family. Stranded in Canada when war breaks out in Europe, he is frantic to reunite with them. Sonia, caught in the grips of the Nazi regime, suddenly finds herself responsible not only for herself but for her mother and younger sister too. Sonia's father works feverishly from Canada to get them out to safety, even managing to become a citizen of neutral Nicaragua, sending false Nicaraguan passports to his family. In Tarnów, Sonia faces the Gestapo again and again, armed with these documents as anti-Jewish laws escalate and the daily violence intensifies. As Sonia bravely tries to shield her family from the atrocities in the Tarnów ghetto, she feels torn between temporary triumphs and an agonizing sense of futility. In the face of deportation, Sonia's wait for a reprieve turns ominous. Will her determination and deception be enough to save her and her family?

In A Promise of Sweet Tea, a Jewish community comes alive in this vividly told story of a childhood interrupted by the Holocaust. In his wry and evocative prose, Pinchas Blitt conjures Kortelisy - a humble, vibrant village in the backwoods of western Ukraine. Young Pinchas lives in fear of Cossacks and wolves and the local antisemitic children, but he finds belonging in the rich texts and traditions of his ancestors. When the Soviets invade, Pinchas's life is infused with new meaning as he innocently devotes himself to the teachings of Comrade Stalin. Then the Nazis arrive, and Pinchas witnesses his beloved village being brutally attacked. As his family seeks safety in the marshes and forests, their precarious existence brings Pinchas face to face with his own mortality and faith, and with a sense of dislocation that will accompany him throughout his life.

In France, underground networks find refuge for eleven-year-old Eva Lang and her younger sisters, protecting them from internment camps. In an orphanage in Slovakia, a pastor shelters young David Korn and his older brother, saving them from deportation. In a village in Poland, a farmer hides nine-year-old Fishel Philip Goldig and his parents after they escape from a ghetto and certain death. When so many people stood by during the anti-Jewish atrocities of the Holocaust, others risked their lives to save their Jewish friends and neighbours, and often even strangers. The three feature memoirs in At Great Risk are accompanied by excerpted stories of rescue by thirteen previously published Azrieli Foundation authors, highlighting the diverse experiences of rescue during the Holocaust. Together, these stories emphasize not only the courage and moral strength of the rescuers but also the survivors' remembrances of and gratitude to their rescuers after the war.

Narrow escapes and bold decisions define the life of teenager Morris Schnitzer. Fleeing from Nazi Germany before the onset of World War II, Morris ends up in the Netherlands only to watch the country be invaded by the Nazis. With his father's warning to never set foot in a concentration camp echoing in his mind, Morris resolves to fight - and survive. As he assumes false identities and crosses endless borders in search of safety, Morris never acquiesces to the Nazi occupiers in Western Europe. In his epic journey to Escape from the Edge, Morris endures imprisonment and gruelling work as a farmhand, joins the resistance in Belgium and ultimately enlists in the American army, vowing to take revenge for all that he has lost.

In the summer of 1944, eighteen-year-old Leslie Fazekas and his family are deported from their hometown of Debrecen, Hungary, to Vienna, Austria, as forced labourers. Fate and fortune have intervened to save their lives - after the war, they discover that nearly half of their Jewish community was sent to Auschwitz. During the devastating circumstances of his captivity, Leslie records his experiences in a diary and in letters to his girlfriend, Judit, from whom he was separated in Vienna. For eight months, Leslie's words alternate between hope and uncertainty in love letters that are also a testimony of his survival during a perilous time. In Dreams Together features Leslie's diary alongside his postwar memoir, a reflection on his childhood, the war and the love that shaped his life.

When Rachel and her husband, Avrumeh, escape from the Siemiatycze ghetto in Poland one cold winter night in 1942 with their four-year-old daughter, Chana, they are desperate for refuge. Turned away by their closest friends, they are forced to wander the countryside looking for places to hide and asking for help from strangers and acquaintances. For close to two years, every day is filled with uncertainty for them and for the courageous farmers who eventually hide them. Throughout, young Chana is fiercely protected by her parents, who teach her not to cry, not to even make a sound. After liberation, Chana's childhood truly begins, and decades later, she finally has the opportunity to honour those who rescued her family. Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, Daring to Hope reflects on the darkness of wartime and the love that held a family together.

In Debrecen, Hungary, Judy grows up in a warm and lively family, but when the Nazis invade in 1944, she is crowded into a ghetto, her life now shaped by fear and hopelessness. When the cattle cars take Judy and her family to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she truly leaves her precious childhood behind as she scrambles to survive in the shadow of the gas chambers, one brutal day at a time. Judy survives by clinging to her sisters, to friends, and to fleeting life-affirming moments, and once she creates a new life for herself in Canada, she makes it her mission to give a voice both to women who were murdered in the Holocaust and to those who survived.

Ferenc Andai is one of approximately 6,000 Jewish Hungarian men conscripted to work as forced labourers in the copper mines of Bor, Serbia, between 1943 and 1944. Subject to the whims of cruel Hungarian commanders and German overseers, the men are forced to work to exhaustion while they subsist on a starvation diet. For nineteen-year old Ferenc, the only relief from his harsh reality is his company - an artistic and literary circle of men that includes the inspirational poet Miklós Radnóti.

In 1944, as Budapest's Jews begin to suffer under German occupation, eleven-year-old Zsuzsi (Susie) takes to her diary to write about her friends and family as she copes with what it means to be persecuted. Precocious and charming, Susie records the mundane along with the poignant as she describes her daily life in Budapest against the backdrop of the war. After the war, uncertain whether she made the right decision to emigrate, Susie writes all her feelings down in a new diary, the only place where she feels she truly belongs.

Commemorating seventy-five years since Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, Confronting Devastation, an anthology of Canadian survivors' memoirs, examines the diverse experiences and memories of the Holocaust in Hungary. From the worsening exclusions that marked Jewish daily life before 1944 to forced labour battalions, ghettos and camps, and persecution and hiding in Budapest, the authors reflect on lives that were shattered, on the sorrows that came with liberation and, ultimately, on how they managed to persevere. Editor Ferenc Laczó frames excerpts from twenty-two memoirs in their historical and political contexts, analyzing the events that led to the horrific "last chapter" of the Holocaust - the genocide of approximately 550,000 Jews in Hungary between 1944 and 1945.

When the Nazis invade eastern Poland in 1941, young Anita Ekstein, a cherished only child in a large, close-knit family, is suddenly living in the shadow of fear and violence. At seven years old, she and her parents are forced from their home into a ghetto, and one day, her mother is gone. As Anita's father desperately tries to save his beloved daughter, he befriends a Catholic man who smuggles Anita out of the ghetto, risking his own life to save hers. Frightened, living among strangers and missing the warmth her parents provided, Anita learns how to be Catholic and spends most of her days inside and in silence. Always at risk of being discovered, Anita has only her newfound faith to accompany her on the lonely path of survival. After the war, orphaned and struggling with her identity, Anita finds her way through her grief and confusion to fulfill her father's last request to Always Remember Who You Are.

Martha Salcudean is ten years old when her childhood comes to an abrupt end. The war has been raging around her for years, but in Northern Transylvania, now a part of Hungary, the atrocities intensify with the Nazi invasion in 1944. Suddenly, Martha and her family are imprisoned in ghettos and surrounded by incomprehensible cruelty. As she and her family are lined up in front of a cattle car train, a split-second decision her father makes changes their fate in an instant - instead of heading to almost certain death in Auschwitz, Martha and her family become destined to be saved by Rudolf Kasztner, a man riskily negotiating with the Nazis. After the war, Martha returns home, only to be caught in the grip of a new Communist dictatorship. Martha's journey In Search of Light takes her through the darkness of two oppressive regimes to the beginning of freedom in Canada, where she is finally able to choose her own path.

Twelve-year-old Leslie Mezei, a lively, curious boy, doesn't realize how precarious his life is as a Jew in German-occupied Hungary in 1944. His older sister Magda, aware of the growing danger from Nazis and Hungarian fascists, takes charge and bravely tries to direct the family's survival, while his sister Klari, tough and determined, faces a brutal ordeal of her own. Confronting deportation, concentration camps and the constant threat of capture, the Mezei siblings carefully navigate the treacherous landscape of wartime Hungary. After the war, the family reunites briefly before setting out in different directions to start new lives, and in Montreal, Leslie meets his wife, Annie, who has a survival story of her own. In A Tapestry of Survival the voices of Leslie, Magda, Klari and Annie are woven together to reveal a larger tale of courage, resilience and the search for healing.

Fleeing Germany after the violence of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, young Joseph and his family find safety in Belgium, but all too soon they have to escape again - this time to France - when the Germans occupy Belgium in 1940. When the Germans then conquer France and Joseph's family returns to Brussels, Joseph is forced to set out on his own, and at sixteen years old, he assumes a false identity and begins to live a dangerous double life. Joseph repeatedly eludes the Nazis' grasp, eventually finding his way to the French Resistance and bravely fighting with the underground until France is liberated. But Joseph's years of fighting are not over, and when he arrives in pre-state Israel, he continues to do everything he can to secure his freedom.

Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving nearly three years in the ghetto, where thousands from the Jewish community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' next victims. But there is no escape from the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family are taken to Kaufering, a brutal subcamp of the notorious Dachau concentration camp. After the war, as his family tries desperately to flee from Germany and their past, Elly is determined to regain his lost youth and education. Throughout his journey, Elly's motivation and enterprising spirit drive him to succeed and, ultimately, to find strength in flight.

Bronia Jablon is separated from her family, and even her husband has escaped into the woods without her. It is 1942, the height of Nazi persecution in Poland, and Bronia and her three-year-old daughter, Lucy, wonder how they will survive each day. Should they hide in their hometown or should they search for their family in the nearby ghetto? Starving and exhausted, Bronia does not know who they can trust when all of their old friends and neighbours are either collaborating with the Nazis or too terrified for their own lives to offer assistance. When they finally find help, a cold, dark cellar becomes both their haven and prison.