by Alexander Freund
University of Winnipeg
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After the Second World War, the survivors of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry dispersed across the globe. Many went to Israel; many others to the United States and Canada. Several hundred immigrated to Winnipeg. This book tells their stories. It documents the experiences of seventy-six Holocaust survivors who settled in Manitoba in the 1940s. The information that is available for each narrator varies depending on whether oral history interviews were conducted and questionnaires filled out by survivors or relatives, and on the availability of historical documents such as drawings, photographs or diaries (as in the rare case of Susan Garfield).
Oscar Abramovitch’s story includes a photograph of him immediately after the British Army had liberated him from Bergen-Belsen, as well as copies of historical documents such as Allied questionnaires and travel documents that enabled him to immigrate to Canada. He included these documents in this book in order to “confirm” that he had indeed been a “concentration camp prisoner” (p.15). Eva Berger’s documentation is much more sparse, consisting only of very brief answers to a short questionnaire. From this we learn that Eva Berger (nee Rothbart) was born in Siedlece, Poland in 1927, experienced “restrictions as a Jew during the war” (the questionnaire’s words, not her own), and that she lived in the Wegrow and Kaluszyn ghettos from November 1940 to October 1942 before going into hiding in the Mengosy Forests until September 1943. It also indicates that she “changed identity” to Roman Catholicism for the last year of the war, and that she lived for a year in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Germany, where she met and married Paul Berger. In 1946 they migrated to France. Readers also learn that she had given testimony previously, but there is neither an indication whether this is accessible nor why this was not used for this book. In some cases, the testimony was not given by the survivors, but rather by a relative. Thus, Mallory Apter tells the story of her grandmother Itzchok Ber Berkowitz. In several cases, relatives filled out questionnaires providing sparse information about their relatives’ lives and deaths during the war. The most extensive family history is that of Stefan Carter and seven of his relatives. Next to his own more elaborate narrative, there are questionnaires of his relatives, filled out by Carter himself. His parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousin all perished in the Holocaust, several in the Warsaw Ghetto.
While these stories are also available through the Manitoba Holocaust Heritage Project’s database, the book is intended as “a tactile and tangible item that we can leaf through and read at our leisure.” Each story of course is a tragedy and, as such, casual “leafing through” may be difficult. The major drawback of this book is that the testimonies are very narrowly focused on the war years. With so little information about the prewar years, we cannot get a sense of the rich European culture that the Nazis and their collaborators destroyed. With so little information about the postwar years, we cannot get a sense of the lives the survivors built from the ashes of their biographies. However, this shortcoming is made up for by many rather extensive memoirs and biographies that often include prewar and postwar experiences, including the stories of Morris Faintuch, Barbara Goszer, Isaac Gotfried, Sarah Henoch, Samuel Jarniewski, Yehudit (Edith) Kimelman, the Kirshners, the Perlovs, the Rubenfelds, and the Shragges. These life stories would be even richer if we knew more about how they were generated and whether they were edited.
Voices of Winnipeg Holocaust Survivors is not an academic study of the Shoah, nor is it a history of Jewish Winnipeg. Rather, it is a memorial to those who perished and those who survived. Unlike the Holocaust Memorial on the grounds of the Provincial Legislature, it is built not of stone but of myriad traces and fragments of memories, some saved from the war years and others remembered and passed on to the next generations. The Province will place a copy of the book in the library of every senior high school in Manitoba. There it will serve not only as a memorial and reminder, but also as a rich sourcebook for the study of the history of the Holocaust.
Page revised: 18 February 2023
