Vivian Stockhamer was born in Lida, Poland in 1936 to Leibel Litovitz and Charna (Boyarski) Litovitz. Her father had 10 siblings and her mother had 3 siblings, all of whom were married with children and many of whom were living in Lida prior to the outbreak of World War II. From 1939 to 1941 Lida […]
Jack Paley was born December 2, 1921 in a Yorkshire village. His father was a veteran of the Great War, one who had seen action at the Somme and who had been a POW of the Germans. Jack attended school until he was 14; he went to work at that time as a keymaker, and […]
Tom Hennessy was born May 31, 1922 in Dublin, Ireland. His father was transferred to Liverpool when Tom was quite young, and then the family returned to Ireland, relocating to the small town of Scarriff, in County Clare. Tom attended a boarding school – Windermere – in northern England, and when he completed that he […]
Edward (Ted) Parker was born March 30, 1925 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He grew up in Massachusetts and Florida, as the family moved back and forth during those years. He grew up against the backdrop of the Depression and the early years of the war, by which time he was attending the Governors’ Academy in Massachusetts. […]
Stanley Wozniak was born January 9, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. He was born into a large family of 11 children, and they grew up in a positive environment in the 1930s, though the coming of war in 1940 impacted the family dramatically. They had been living in western Poland, but the aftermath of the German […]
Emile Svarc was born in 1936 in Yugoslavia. His young life as he recalls was quite good, but the coming of the war in 1941 changed everything. Yugoslavia was divided, with a puppet state created in Croatia and the rest of the country under Axis occupation. Emile recalls the mounting restrictions of this period; his […]
Judah Samet was born in Debrecen, Hungary on February 5, 1938. He attributes his wartime survival to his mother, whose brave actions brought Judah and his siblings through the war. Hungary’s Jews had been insulated from the worst horrors of the Shoah for most of the war, but all that ended with the German invasion […]
Andrew Tylman was born in November 1933, and he grew up in the town of Sochaczew, Poland. His early life took place in a largely Jewish milieu,and the family was prosperous, vacationing in Glowno and prominent in the community. The onset of the war changed the situation dramatically; as violence in his small town began […]
Eugene Katz was born in Dyszna, Poland in in 1927. He was one of five children, growing up in a Jewish family not too far from Vilna; he recalls a difficult life, beset by hunger and poverty, but also filled with family and friends. When war came in 1939, Eugene’s family was in eastern Poland, […]
This week Crestwood was visited by Faye Kieffer who spoke to Mrs. Winograd’s Grade 8 class about her experiences during the Holocaust. Faye is a hidden child survivor and she was born in Binyacorna, Poland in 1928. When the war broke out, Faye and her family were quickly moved to Ghettos. Her mother and siblings were taken […]
Felicia Carmelly is a Romanian Holocaust survivor currently residing in Toronto. Born in 1932 amidst European anti-Semitism, Felicia faced persecution at the hands of the Green Shirts in Romania. Felicia and her family were taken from their hometown to Transnistria, an area under Romanian governance where Romanian Jews were forced into mass ghettos. Here, she […]
Hank Rosenbaum was born into a comfortable Jewish family in Warsaw in 1936. The German invasion of Poland turned life for the Rosenbaum family upside down. He and his family would spend the next 6 years in and out of ghettos- escaping and evading the Germans on multiple occasions. He spent the final years of […]
Today Crestwood was visited by Faye Kieffer who spoke to our Grade 8 class about her experiences during the Holocaust. The grade 8 class has been studying The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and discussing the notion of the “hidden child.” Faye is a hidden child survivor. Her emotional story is likely to remain with […]
Etti Miller is a child survivor of the Holocaust. Born just as the war was beginning, Etti and her family were forced into the Vilna Ghetto. They were lucky to escape the liquidation of the ghetto, as they managed to find their way into the forests. They remained there the duration of the war, living […]
Jozef Cipin was a young boy when the war began. He and his family were on the run in the early part of the war, evading the Nazis and hiding out with the partisans. When the Gestapo caught up, Jozef was interrogated and deported to the Terezin camp, where he managed to survive the Holocaust. […]
Simon Zelcovitch was born in Poland shortly before the onset of the war. When his father foresaw the approaching Nazi invasion, the family fled to Russia, where they lived in ghettoes. With the escalation of the Holocaust, the family followed Simon’s older brother Yossel into the forest, where they took refuge in the Bielski Brothers’ […]
Faye Wolpianska was born in Bieniekonie, Poland, in 1928. Her childhood came to an end in June 1941 when the Nazis came to her village. With the war underway, Faye and her family were quickly moved into a ghetto. As conditions worsened, the family made the decision to leave, ending up in the larger Vilna […]
Esther Bem was raised in Zagreb. Two of her older sisters, Jelka and Vera, joined Tito’s Underground Resistance Army in 1941. Jelka was caught by the Croat Fascist Ustashi in 1942 and executed. Vera was cited for bravery by Tito’s Partisans and became an officer. Esther and her parents survived by hiding in Italy with […]