Sustaining Memories Stories Of Canadian Holocaust Survivors

The Azrieli Foundation established the Sustaining Memories Project to help survivors write their stories. A unique partnership between survivors and volunteer writing partners who were trained to work with Holocaust survivors on recording and transcribing their stories, volunteers spent countless hours on these testimonies. The strength of the bonds that form when a volunteer and a survivor create a memoir, of the emotional challenges that a survivor faces in the telling and the understanding, and the insight that the listener experiences were all part of an incredible journey. Excerpts of these co-written memoirs, never before published, are produced in this anthology to give readers a wide range of understanding of the varieties of experiences of Holocaust survivors. Sustaining Memories gives voice to Canadian Jews who suffered through ghettos, camps, hiding, fighting in the underground, as refugees in foreign countries or passing as non-Jews in daily fear of betrayal. Following their liberation, survivors often had to congregate in displaced persons camps, where many married, had children and waited years for countries to offer them new homes. Some would end up in the detention camps of Cyprus on their way to pre-state Israel; others found themselves locked behind the Iron Curtain for decades. Between 1946 and the 1980s, they all built new lives in Canada.

"My family and I were in hiding. Suddenly I heard someone panting on the stairs . . . we didn't breathe. Who was coming now?"

An anthology of excerpts from twenty memoirs who survived the Holocaust in Hungary.

The majority of children who survived the Holocaust, whether in hiding or in labour and concentration camps, remained silent about their wartime experiences. Those who wanted to talk, were often silenced by well-meaning adults who advised them to forget the past and get on with their lives. The memories and traumas simmered for nearly forty years, each child growing into adulthood thinking they alone struggled with the problems of traumatic memory, identity confusion and other consequences. In the 1980's, there was a stirring of awareness amongst some child survivors about issues to be addressed. Small groups formed in the U.S.A. and Canada and gave birth to the child survivor movement, culminating in a large international gathering of "Hidden Children" in New York in 1991. This book comprises a compilation of talks offered to child Holocaust survivors, over a 25 year period - from the birth of self-awareness to present day awareness of the need to inform the next generations of their parent's experiences. Dasberg, Krell and Wiesel are themselves child survivors. Moskovitz founded the Los Angeles Child Survivor group following her pioneering study of child survivors. Gilbert has written and lectured extensively about children in the Holocaust. This book offers the child survivor an opportunity to reflect not only on survival but its effects. For the spouses and children it clarifies some of the dynamics unique to their families and for Mental Health professionals it provides insights into the effects of trauma as well as the remarkable resilience of traumatized children.

Holocaust survivors write about how they were rescued by those who refused to stand by during the war.

A powerful, lyrical memoir by a World War II survivor of forced labor in the copper mines of Bor, Serbia.