Alfred Grubb was born October 25, 1921 on a farm near Hanover, Ontario. Alfred’s father had been a farmer, but when Alfred was three years old the family relocated to nearby Teeswater, where his father took a job at the local creamery. Alfred attended school up to Grade 8, but he was not fond of […]
Major Harvey has over 20 years of experience in the Canadian Armed Forces, having joined the reserves in 1992. While serving in the reserves and completing his university education, Major Harvey was deployed as a part of Canada’s peacekeeping missions in Haiti (1996) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1999). In 2000, Maj. Harvey transferred to regular forces as […]
Freda Rosenberg is a Holocaust Survivor from Radom, Poland. She survived the full weight of the war years, passing through a number of ghettoes and camps, including Auschwitz Birkenau. When the Red Army was approaching, she was forced on a death march, which she recounts in detail here. Surviving that ordeal too, Freda was liberated […]
Fred Davies was born May 6, 1923 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, into a family of six brothers and one sister. He graduated high school and volunteered for the RCAF, choosing the air force because he wanted to be a pilot. After enlisting, he was sent to Manning Depot in Montreal for training, after which he […]
Augusta Bansbach was born October 9, 1921 in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a small rural community there, living on a farm with her parents and grandparents, alongside her Czech and German neighbours. Educational opportunities were limited for girls at that time, so Augusta’s schooling was complete after 8th grade, and […]
Robert Reichmann was born on January 11,1938 in Budapest, Hungary. He later decided to change his name to Robert (Bob) Ratonyi, hoping to escape the name-associated antisemitism that was prevalent even in postwar Hungary. In the early part of the war, Bob mentioned that Hungarian Jews were an insulated group: in November 1940 Hungary’s Horthy […]
Clyde Cassidy was born January 31, 1925 in Barton, Vermont, not too far from where he lives today. He grew up against the backdrop of the Depression, but as his father had steady work with the railroad conditions were not too bad for the family. Clyde was in high school when the attack on Pearl […]
Hugh McGeach was born May 8, 1921 in London, Ontario. He grew up on a farm, and later in the city of London, against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Hugh’s father was a Great War veteran whose health had deteriorated, necessitating the move. Lloyd graduated from a technical high school and became an automotive […]
Edward Moczulski was born in Brest, Poland. Edward’s family ended up in the Soviet zone of occupation after Poland was divided in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Life continued in these new circumstances, but then in 1940 a Red Army officer appeared at the family’s door, looking for Edward’s older brother. The family did not […]
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 […]
Gunter Nitsch was born December 3, 1937 in Konigsberg, Germany. He was only two when the war began, so he has no memories of that, but he does remember many remarkable events during and especially after the war as Gunter grew up against the backdrop of Nazism and the war, and then Stalin and the […]
Angi Orosz was born December 21, 1944, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of a handful of Jewish babies born in the camp who was able to survive. Her mother Vera Bein gave birth to Angela in that terrible place, and as Angi says in her testimony she speaks to honour her mother’s determination and fight to survive, […]
Mila Mesner was born November 22, 1923 in Zalishchyky, Poland (now Ukraine). She recalls a positive childhood, full of family and good memories. All of that changed with the beginning of the war: Mila’s town was in the Soviet zone of occupation, and she remembers that arrests and deprivation began right away. Mila’s father chose […]
Judith Nemes Black was born November 15, 1941 in Budapest, Hungary. She grew up against the backdrop of the war and the mounting restrictions that Hungarian Jews were forced to endure, including the conscription of her father into forced labour. In 1944 the situation deteriorated for Hungarian Jews; Nazi Germany invaded and the fascist Arrow […]
Avraham Peter grew up in the city of Lodz, Poland, where he was born August 12, 1926. His parents had their own factory/business and the family was living a good, observant life, and the young Abe attended a Jewish school, and was raised in part by his grandparents. Anti-Semitism was a reality in 1930s Lodz […]
This past Wednesday, January 27, was Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, and in subsequent months other camps were liberated by the Allies. International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the end of the genocide that resulted in the deaths of […]
Les Mitelman is a Crestwood grandfather; his grandson Liam Stern was in Grade 8 at the time this interview was completed. Les was born in Tarnopol, Poland on July 21, 1938, so he was only a baby when the war began, so growing up he had to learn the unspeakable and horrible lessons the Shoah […]
Daniel Gold was born in Lithuania on February 10, 1937. When the war began for Lithuania – in 1941 – the country was quickly overrun by the Germans, and Lithuanian Jews were placed in ghettos, and not longer after the mass murder began. Daniel remembers having to be quiet while Lithuanian neighbours were initiating the […]
Georgine Nash was born in Hungary on June 16,1937. She grew up during the war, and as was the case with most Hungarian Jews, she enjoyed a distance from the terrible conflict, and the from the terrible Shoah that was commencing in the neighbouring countries. Georgine remembers her father being taken away to a labour […]
Helena Hirschl (nee Beinhacker) was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1928. An only child, she grew up in a well-to-do assimilated family, and her father was in the construction business. Helena remembers the prewar period in largely positive terms. She was unaware of the hatred bubbling beneath the surface; she had friends and liked school, […]
Evgeny Voitinsky served in the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Evgeny grew up in Leningrad before the war, but after the German invasion of June 1941, Evgeny and his mother relocated to Kazakstan, where the teenaged Evgeny adapted to the new realities of wartime life. He worked at this time in a factory, […]
Jim McPhee served in the RCAF during the Second World War. Jim grew up in northern Ontario, not too far from the Sault; Jim came from a large family, and lived not too far from Bruce Mines . Jim remembers going to a one-room schoolhouse in his early years, as well as work on the […]
Michael Zarembo is a Lithuanian Jew, one of so many overwhelmed with the terrible events that befell his people and region during the war. 1941 saw the initiation of that horror…Germany initiated Operation Barbarossa, and within days Michael’s family was under the heel of the Nazi regime. Life became increasingly difficult in the ghettos that were […]
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, […]
Reuven Blium survived the Holocaust in Lithuania, a country where as many as 95% of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Reuven was born in 1930 in Kaunas, into a family of limited means. Reuven’s father passed away when Reuven was only 3, and his mother had no alternative but to put […]
Mike Smith was born in the USSR, in the former republic of Belarus. He grew up near Pinsk, in a traditional Jewish family. When the war came to the USSR in 1941, he joined the Soviet Red Army, where he became a member of the Scouts’ Brigade. Doing some of the most dangerous work behind […]
Andy Reti was born July 16, 1942 in Budapest, Hungary. He is a child survivor from the Shoah. Andy’s father did not survive those terrible years: he was taken to a forced labour battalion and later murdered in Auschwitz Birkenau. Andy, along with his mother and grandparents, survived the horrors of the war through good […]
Max Sitzer is a Holocaust Survivor from Poland who has a family connection at Crestwood; he was interviewed by his young cousin Mara Bowman here at the school in March 2013. Max lived in eastern Poland and was under Soviet rule for the first part of the war, but with the German invasion in 1941 […]
Eddy Sterk lived in Holland at the beginning of the war. As his father worked in a hospital, Eddy and his family were able to evade the early deportations, which slowly saw Amsterdam’s Jews transported “to the east”. Eddy’s siblings were eventually taken, and soon after Eddy and his parents were rounded up as well. […]
Edith Pagelson’s personal story of survival began in Germany. She and her family were victims of Hitler’s Nazi regime well before the war began, feeling the sting of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht all through the 1930s. She and her family were deported from Duisberg to the Terezin Ghetto, where Edith’s father died. After spending […]