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June 26, 2009
Memoirs chronicle survival
Thousands pack a Toronto theatre to hear new Azrieli series.
DAVE GORDON
Alex Levin remembers being dragged, at age 12, into a forest by his brother. There, the two lived for a year and a half, together surviving the Holocaust, by burying themselves in the earth, hiding in the thicket of branches and leaves, and subsisting on foliage. They made it out just before the Nazis overran their town, Rokitno, and massacred every Jew there.
Levin's is one of five new memoirs in English and three in French – the second of such sets in as many years – produced recently by the Azrieli Foundation. The newest publications of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs were presented on June 15 at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, with some 2,000 in attendance. The evening included readings by the authors and/or relatives and was emceed by veteran CBC journalist Joe Schlesinger. A week earlier, a similar event was held in Montreal.
Readings of the Toronto evening were Album of My Life, by Ann Szedlecki, read by Lynda Kraar; E/96: Fate Undecided by Paul-Henri Rips; Memories from the Abyss by William Tannenzapf, read by Robert Krakauer; A Happy Childhood by Renate Krakauer; Under the Yellow and Red Stars by Alex Levin; and A Drastic Turn of Destiny by Fred Mann, read by Larry Mann.
Dr. Naomi Azrieli, chair and executive director of the Azrieli Foundation, spoke of how she noticed how many times she used the word "listen," noting that many rarely internalized its meaning. "I use it so normally ... I was stuck by how transformative it can be. The sensitivity and emotion is unfathomable," she said, referring to the importance, particularly today, of the aural transmission of survivor's stories. The books, moreover, "broaden our experience of tolerance, sanctity and dignity of human life, that a history text could not. One story at a time, readers can grasp the ideas," she said.
Philanthropist David Azrieli established the Azrieli Foundation in 1989. Among its most-known initiatives is the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Publishing Program, which collects, preserves and publishes the written memoirs of survivors. In 2005, the foundation began publishing the memoirs of Holocaust survivors who made their way to Canada, who numbered about 30,000.
Online editions of the books are available at no charge. The books are also distributed free to libraries, schools and educational programs across Canada. To date, the program has amassed about 170 memoirs. The first series was compiled in 2007.
Sara Horowitz, director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, wanted to dispel the suspicions that some have of first-person accounts of the Shoah. "They believe that memoirs impoverished the fabric of the [historical] record. But it is a vantage point like no other," she said.
Nechama Tec, Holocaust survivor and scholar, offered the keynote address. Currently professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut, Tec was appointed to the Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2002.
Born in Lublin, Poland, in 1931, she recounted how, for three years during the Holocaust, she, lucky at the time to be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired child, pretended to be a Catholic, and was taken in by Polish Catholics. "I felt, in a sense, safe," she said.
Tec said she could not bring herself to exhume the memories of the Shoah until three decades after the war. Eventually, after a few books on other topics, including one on adolescent use of illicit drugs, her own memoirs were published in 1974, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood. She also wrote Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, on which the 2008 Hollywood film Defiance was based. Defiance recounts the true story of the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews during the Shoah.
While in school, posing as a Catholic, Tec recalled the anti-Semitic poison being inculcated: "We were taught that Jews were thieves, and ate matzah of children." The adults who protected her during the war offered her advice on how to buffer the potential psychological damage done by the Nazis: "Don't hate them. Feel sorry for them."
Dave Gordon is a freelance writer in Toronto. His website is DaveGordonWrites.com.
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