Memories of a refugee

OLGA LIVSHIN

In our imperfect world, there are millions of refugees. Even though many have already escaped war, torture or death, they also are forced to flee their homes and their countries. In the process, they often lose their language, culture, friends and relatives. A Story to Tell and a Place for the Telling is an educational program of the Canadian Red Cross, in partnership with the Vancouver Public Library. Since 2003, the program, held at the Vancouver Public Library, has been raising public awareness of the problems of refugees. The first event of the 2008/2009 season, on Nov. 18, was dedicated to the history of Jewish refugees from Europe after the Second World War.

The evening had two presenters, Lesley Stalker, assistant legal officer with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, a child Holocaust survivor. Stalker's slide presentation offered the audience lots of statistics, factual information and historical photographs, while Boraks-Nemetz contributed a very personal view, laced with the piercing and sometimes bitter memories of a former refugee.

Boraks-Nemetz was five years old when Germany invaded Poland. Interned in the Warsaw Ghetto, together with her family and thousands of other Polish Jews, she witnessed the horrors of the Nazi occupation while still a child; the Holocaust was her only school. Even now, decades later, those memories bring tears to her eyes and a catch to her voice.

When, in 1947, she and her family ended up as refugees in Canada, their troubles should have been over. Canada was safe – nobody shot at Jews or herded them to death camps. But the adjustment to the new land proved to be neither easy nor simple. Uprooted and disoriented, Boraks-Nemetz went to school for the first time when she was 13. She didn't know any English, and the school system didn't offer English as a second language classes at the time.

Memories of the terrible events she had lived through tormented her, but the people surrounding her were not interested. "Nobody wanted to hear about the war," she recalled. The locals were indifferent; the plight of European Jews wasn't their concern, she said. The survivors also wanted to leave the war behind and build new lives as soon as possible. Forget and move forward was the motto of the day, according to Boraks-Nemetz, who unfortunately could not forget.

When she was young, Boraks-Nemetz could read and write in Polish, she wrote poetry and was very well read for her age, but English was difficult to master. With her limited English, she failed a couple of classes, freezing inside in misery and loneliness. "Many considered me a stupid, flighty blond," she said with a wry smile. In response, she created another personality, the one who laughed and pretended to be like everybody else, the one who could fit in and not invite uncomfortable questions from her peers and family. But the sorrowful Jewish girl and her stinging memories still hunkered inside, hidden from view.

Compounding Lillian's problems, her beloved father died soon after they came to Canada. Her mother remarried and moved to Vancouver, and the family sent 15-year-old Boraks-Nemetz to St. Margaret's Christian School in Victoria.

Searching for her new Canadian identity, Boraks-Nemetz tried to do what was expected of her. She tried to conform. After graduating from school, she went to university to study home economics. She worked at a bank and started a family, but her feelings of displacement and dissatisfaction grew instead of diminishing. Her memories pushed for release. Millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis begged her to give them a voice – and she yearned to write.

At 34, she went back to school to study language and literature. "I wrote essays night after night," she remembered. She attained her bachelor's and then master's in comparative literature, and still her wartime memories wouldn't let her rest. Six years later, they burst. To deal with the accompanying depression, she left her family and moved to Toronto for two years to dedicate herself entirely to writing. This was the pivotal point in her life, she said, and she never looked back.

Since 1980, Boraks-Nemetz has been teaching creative writing at her alma mater – at the University of British Columbia Writing Centre. In 1989, she co-founded the Holocaust Child Survivor Group in Vancouver and was its chair for four years. She often speaks to school children and adults about the Holocaust. She also has published three young adult novels based on her memories, translated two volumes of poetry by Polish poets Waclaw Iwaniuk and Andrzej Busza, and published two of her own poetry books: Garden of Steel in 1998 and Ghost Children in 2000.

Boraks-Nemetz's novel The Old Brown Suitcase (1995) won the Sheila A. Egoff B.C. Book Prize for children's literature and the Rachel Bassin Prize of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto. The book is presently on the recommended reading list for B.C. schools.

The Sunflower Diary, a sequel to The Old Brown Suitcase, was published in 1999. The Lenski File, the third book of the trilogy, was published in 2000. Boraks-Nemetz is writing an adult novel now.

In the foreword to Garden of Steel, published under the pseudonym of Jagna Boraks, she wrote: "After years of struggle with life and language, the need to write poetry emerged again, this time in English. This was coupled with the realization that I was a prisoner of a cruel childhood. Those early experiences found their expression in my use of harsh and concrete imagery from which sprung the realm of the Garden of Steel. Garden of Steel is for me a kind of prison from which the only escape lies in the act of creation."

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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