March will be life-changing

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

“There is just something so essential about being there and seeing it for yourself that contextualizes it in a way that you couldn’t otherwise,” David Emanuel told the Independent about his trip to Poland and Israel with March of the Living in 2010.

“It exceeded my expectations,” he said of the program, which is why he will, once more, be a chaperone, traveling with what he hopes will be 25-30 Vancouver participants on the 2012 excursion, scheduled to take place April 15-30. They will be joined by Vancouver-based Holocaust survivor Marie Doduck, who will be accompanied by her two high school-aged grandchildren and, hopefully, her daughters.

During March of the Living, thousands of Jewish teens from around the world – including more than 600 from Canada – march the three-kilometre distance separating Auschwitz from Birkenau. Participants visit Polish cities and villages that were once centres of Jewish life, they hear speakers, meet other students and engage in various learning and social activities. In Israel, they tour sites and take part in Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance Day) ceremonies and Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations. Prior to leaving Canada, the students attend several educational seminars on topics including Jewish life before the war, the history of antisemitism, Nazism, the state of Israel, as well as life in the Diaspora.

Coordinated by Canada Israel Experience, a department of United Israel Appeal Federations Canada, March of the Living is subsidized by local campaigns and Emanuel said that a significant effort is being made to raise community funds to subsidize the estimated $5,600/student cost. He said it looks promising that every student will be able to receive some aid; as well, there are scholarships available for students who can demonstrate financial need.

In speaking with the Independent, Emanuel could barely contain his enthusiasm for the program. In addition to being a chaperone, he has become involved at the committee level, in the hopes that Vancouverites can have some influence on the curriculum. He gave as an example the possibility of having the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs run one of the pre-trip sessions, perhaps on the St. Louis – the ship carrying German Jewish refugees that was refused sanctuary in Canada (and other countries) in 1939 and forced to return to Europe. He suggested that a comparison could be made between the situation then and now, and that a discussion could take place of “how really being engaged in the political process and understanding the democratic process, etc., is essential to being able to defend against things like fascism ... so that [we] encourage the kids to understand the importance of being politically involved.”

But already, without such additions, said Emanuel, “The reality is that the experience in and of itself is so stark, and even in the messaging that is already built into the program, it’s just so magnified when you’re there that it’s just incredible, it’s phenomenal.”

When you go to Poland, “there’s this juxtaposition of Jewish life and this absolute destruction,” he explained. “You go to Tykocin,” he said by way of example, “and they take you into this beautiful shul that is still there ... and you look around and, all of a sudden, you realize, there’s all these prayers that are written up on the walls, painted on the walls, and you think, ‘Oh, I get it ... the printing press had just been invented; the cost of a siddur was more than a person’s life earnings.’ And you’re just standing in this beautiful place that has held the spirit of Judaism for 500 years and then it’s gone.”

As the group walked away from the shul to some of the other Jewish areas in Tykocin, on erev Shabbat, Emanuel said, “I was just thinking, I wonder what erev Shabbas was like 70 years ago.... You could hear the whole bustle of people getting ready in the marketplace, buying their food, doing this and the next thing, and then I’m thinking to myself ... on that morning, the morning that the Jews were shlepped away [on Aug. 25, 1941, to be shot to death by the Nazis], people had come out of shul, had been praying, there were tallisim probably lying around, siddurim lying around, the Torah scrolls were in the ark, and now the Jews had left. And you see the building, the soul of the building is the people. The body of the building is the building, [and] you can almost see the body crying out, saying, ‘Where are you? Come back!’ You see the life and the destruction, it’s so raw.”

About her participation in the upcoming trip, Doduck told the Independent, “I never wanted to do it before. I didn’t want to go to Poland because I lost all my family in Auschwitz, but I went home just this summer; I went back to Brussels after 35 years.”

She explained, “I had a great-great-nephew getting married and I had never met him, and there were a lot of great-nieces and -nephews, and [other family].” When she was there, she remembered everything. “I left home when I was four. My family who took me [back] there were shocked that I described everything around the whole area and I also shocked myself. I spoke French, I understood Dutch ... things just came back and I closed that door.

“Then I took a cruise through Germany,” she continued, sharing some of the places to which she went, such as Nuremberg and the arena there, where, she said, she had a guide who “was so proud of his grandmother getting the Bronze Cross from Hitler because she had four children. After he told this story ... it made me so mad, I just opened my mouth and yelled out, ‘I survived!’ And I came back and I said, ‘OK, I’m going to do it,’” she said about March of the Living. But, she added, “I’ve got to tell you, I still don’t know if I can get into Auschwitz, because I never cross a bridge until I reach it.”

Doduck said she thought the trip “would be great for my grandchildren, who have never been on the March of the Living, who are in King David High School” and that she had just spoken “to a young woman that works at Federation who was there a few years ago, from Edmonton, and she said how it changed her life. And I thought, OK, I’ve closed a door, I’m opening another door, and I’m going to go and I’m going to see.”

Doduck is a co-founder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and has been one of their speakers for years. She shared with the Independent some of her life history, more of which can be found in VHEC’s online exhibit Open Hearts-Closed Doors: The War Orphans Project.

The youngest of 11 children, Doduck said that she and seven of her siblings were the only survivors of the family; her mother was killed during the Holocaust, her father had died when she was a year and a half old. Doduck survived the war in hiding, moving from country to country, always ready to leave the convent, home or orphanage in which she was hiding.

She arrived in Canada in late 1947, through Halifax’s Pier 21, with other survivor children on the SS Aquitania, eventually landing in Vancouver in early January 1948 – she was almost 12 years old. Of her surviving siblings, three came to Vancouver with her. They were meant to go to Montreal, because they spoke French, but “we got off the train, and I said, ‘Nobody speaks here, they speak a patois.’ And then we were dumped in Winnipeg with seven feet of snow ... and I said, ‘Can’t live here. You’ve got to get me out of here.’ The [Canadian] Jewish Congress brought me here, not the government,” she explained, noting that Canada accepted only 1,123 orphans of the Holocaust.

In Vancouver, nobody would take four children, “especially from the war,” said Doduck. “They called us sauvages, savages.... It was that we were children with adult minds.”

Canada was not a welcoming place, she said. “I never really made a lot of friends when I was younger because they made fun of me when I came to this country, like every country,” she explained. “In those days, accents were not accepted. I couldn’t get a job because I still had a slight French accent. I had to fight for everything, struggled, but I had a wonderful seven and a half years of youth with my foster parents, Joe and Minnie Satanov; they brought me back to Yiddishkeit, which I didn’t really know what it was. Then, as things progressed, I remembered certain things my mother did, like lighting candles, she made lokshen noodles, threw them in the air, I used to like them. I remember those things.”

Doduck said she changed her name from Mariette to the more Canadian-sounding Marie when she was at Maple Grove School in Kerrisdale, at the suggestion of a teacher – Miss Mowatt – who Doduck described as “my lifesaver.” Doduck did grades 1 through 6 in one year, she said; English was her ninth language.

“I committed myself to this community because I wanted to pay back my foster parents, their giving,” said Doduck, who chose not to be adopted by the Satanovs because her brother Jean had told her during the war to not change her surname (Rozen) until she was married, which she did at age 19.

In her life, Doduck not only has been involved in almost every Jewish organization, but she has held several different jobs, including working in insurance, being a dental nurse and working with her husband designing buildings. While she never graduated university, she said she was always learning. “I’m still hungry for learning,” she said. “I think I’m the first one in my group that had a computer, because I said that’s what we needed to do and my husband, I told him he had to learn to do that. We went to a course called – I’ll never forget it as long I live – there was an ad in the paper that says, ‘How to Turn Me On.’ I said to my husband, ‘That’s where we’re going!’”

Online registration for March of the Living (marchoftheliving.org) takes place Oct. 4-18. Applications include short-answer questions and an essay, and students must attend an interview. There is a local information session on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m., at King David High School. For more information, call Shelley Goldberg, 604-257-5100, or visit jewishvancouver.com.

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