Steve Kuti is a survivor of the Shoah from Budapest, Hungary, one with a remarkable story to tell. He remembers growing up in relative privilege; his parents did well and were accepted in the larger community. But with changes in Hungary’s wartime government, restrictions came into play, and Steve remembers his family being pushed to […]
Nathan Rosenberg is a survivor of the Second World War and the Shoah. While so many Jews were caught up in that terrible period of history, Nathan and his family were fortunate to escape, and what makes their story different is that they escaped to the east, into the heart of the USSR. When their […]
Guta Israel was born in Sandomierz, Poland, where she was one of seven siblings. The Germans invaded her hometown when she was 13, and the full weight of the Shoah hit soonafter. Polish Jews were quickly placed in ghettos, and while many were murdered in short order by the SS, Guta was among those selected […]
Jacob Goldstein was born in Lodz Poland on April 12, 1928. Growing up he had 4 siblings, his older brother Ali, his younger brother Yossi, and his younger sister Ettel . The city of Lodz was the second largest city in Poland. There was a population size of around 600 000, of which 250 000 […]
Manny Langer was born June 6th 1929, in Lodz Poland to a large Jewish family, with three sisters and two brothers. Before the beginning of the Second World War, his family had a successful Kosher dairy business. In the morning he attended Hebrew school, and in the afternoon Polish school. In addition to Hebrew school, […]
Helen was born in Lithuania, in 1932. In 1944, after the Kovno Ghetto was liquidated, Helen and her mother were shipped to the Stutthof concentration camp. The men were separated, including Helen’s father Yitzhak, who was taken to Dachau and killed. In January of 1945, Helen and her mother were left behind while the Jews […]
Sophie Pollack, like other Jewish children living in Europe at the time of the Second World War, had her childhood snatched away from her at the hands of the Nazis. Born in Skierniewice, Poland, Sophie told us about her miraculous story of survival, after being placed in the Koluszki Ghetto and then just barely managing to […]
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, […]
Stefania Sitbon is a Holocaust Survivor from Poland. She was born just before the war began, so Stefania doesn’t remember the German invasion, or life before the war. The memories she has are of her childhood, a time when things had changed dramatically. Stefania grew up in the chaos and hunger of the Warsaw Ghetto, […]
Sid Handler was born In Vilnius, Lithuania in 1934 (at the time it was part of Poland and he was born with Polish citizenship) as Samuel Rezjewski. Through his childhood, he had lived close to lots of family, and was always surrounded by them. When the Holocaust Began and they were forced into the Vilna […]
Born in the small town of Klimontov, Poland in 1938, Saul was only an infant when Europe transformed into a war zone. He was born into a loving family: his father was a banker, his mother was a homemaker, and he had two older brothers. Saul remembers very little of this briefly relatively peaceful life […]
Kitty Salsberg was born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 14, 1932. Orphaned after the war, Kitty and her younger sister, Ellen, immigrated to Canada in 1948 through the Canadian Jewish Congress’s War Orphans Project. Kitty and her younger sister, Ilonka, arrived in Canada with painful memories from the Holocaust, which took both of their parents. […]
Jean Chase is a survivor from Trembovla, Poland, a small village near Tarnopol. Born in 1933, Jean was the only child of Chuna and Nechama Goldstein. When the Nazis came, the family was relocated to the Tarnopol ghetto, and though she was very young Jean remembered many key moments from this period. She recalled the […]
Lili Friedman is a child survivor from the Holocaust and a longtime supporter of our program here at Crestwood. Born in Poland at the outset of the war, Lili grew up in the Lodz ghetto, from where she remembers snippets of her childhood. She and her family were deported to Auschwitz with the liquidation of the […]
Mendel Good was born in March,1925 in Nowy-Sacz, Poland, which was a very religious and mostly Jewish city. He had a happy family and it was big and close. Mendel had two brothers and a little sister. After the Nazi invasion, Mendel stayed in camps from the age 14 to the age of 21. He […]
On December 7th, 2015, six students from Crestwood Preparatory College went to the Baycrest Centre to interview Sam Weisberg, accompanied by his wife, Rosa. Sam is a Holocaust survivor, born to a Jewish family in a German-speaking region of Poland called Silesia in 1927. He was taken to the Krakow ghetto, and later to multiple […]
For the past few months my grade 8 English class has been reading a book called, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. The novel takes place during the Holocaust, so on a related note, last Tuesday, our class had the honour of meeting Holocaust survivor Sally Wasserman, who came to talk to […]
Read More… from Holocaust Education: Written By Zachary Halpern
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Rose Lipszyc was born in 1929 in Lublin, Poland. By all accounts, her life was a good one, full of family and happy memories. All that changed in the early days of the Second World War, when the Nazis invaded. Her family was sent to the ghetto, watching as the liquidations took their neighbours away. […]
Freda (Franka) Kon is from Lodz, Poland. Freda and her family had been a nice, normal life when the tragedy of the Holocaust descended upon them. They were put into the Lodz Ghetto, where they would stay for the next four year, condemned to slave labour and starvation. But as a young woman, in a […]
Magda Hilf was born in Maly Kevesd, Czechoslovakia, in 1921. Her early years consist of many fond memories, with family and friends and books, all in a rural setting. After 1938’s Munich Accord, the situation changed: when the Hungarians took over her region, the restrictions began. Her father lost his business, and he and so […]
Helen Roth was born towards the end of the Great Depression. Helen was only in elementary school when World War 2 began. She had 2 sisters and four brothers and out of all of them only her and her brother are still alive today. Helen’s father passed away when she was 3, so he did […]
Susan Pasternak, born Sissi Friedman was 7 months old when the war broke out in September of 1939. She was born on February 1st, 1939 in Zambriow, which is in northeastern Poland. Her parent’s names were Mordechai and Sarah Friedman and Susan was their first and only child. Her father had his own bakery shop […]
Paula Goldhar is a survivor from Poland. In December 2014 she shared her very compelling story with Mrs. Winograd’s English 8 class. Paula recounted the painful memories that made up her childhood in a very precise way, from the deprivations of the ghetto and the camps to the memories that still are with her every […]
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 […]
When Esther Fairbloom’s mother was pregnant she went to a ghetto in Tarnopol to deliver Esther. Her mother knew the Germans would come after them, so she sat down with her sister and made the choice to have her two children hidden. She had known the people at the local church and they agreed to […]
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 […]