Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2021 23:16:21 -0500
From: Emil or Nedra 


Thank you so much to everyone that has shared their family stories and
experiences in coming to Canada. I have read them all with tears in my eyes,
realizing how alike they all are to mine. Our shared memories and history go
back long before OHS or Strathcona. This retelling has been a catharsis for me.
My parents did not talk to me about their lives before coming to Canada to spare
me the pain of knowing. But as Avrim pointed out, it was in the air we breathed
at home. So I grew up both knowing but not knowing.

My parents were also not very welcomed by the established Jewish community when
we arrived in Montreal in 1948 and as you recall, the terms Greeneh and Gayleh
were used to distinguish between the different classes of Jews. To this day,
whenever I visit my aunt, who was brought to the US as a war orphan in 1946, she
still points to the residents in her home and whispers to me ? that one is a
Greeneh, that one is a Gayleh. Sadly, after 75 years, there is still this divide
for her.

When David mentioned Lvov as part of his parent's journey, I wondered whether
his parents might have known mine who were both from Lvov (also Lwow or Lviv and
for awhile called Lemberg). A year after the Germans invaded the Russian part of
Poland in 1941, my mother's entire family was rounded up during an Action and
transported to the Belzec killing centre. My mother who had been walking the
streets, returned home to find her little sister (who was 11) hiding. Alone, the
two of them somehow managed to get to Warsaw, obtain false papers, jobs as maids
in separate homes, keeping their identities as Jews secret. They arranged to
pass by each other at a certain street corner every week but without
acknowledging each other in order to know that they were still safe. They always
moved to another place whenever suspicion arose that they might be Jews.

My father's entire family was murdered in Lvov and the Belzec camp. He alone
survived by escaping from the Janowska forced labor camp and making his way to
Russia. He ended up being conscripted into the Russian army, then deserting and
making his way back to Lvov after the war where he met my mother. Eventually,
along with my aunt, they got to the DP camp in Linz Austria where I was born.
Given the ongoing pogroms still occurring, my father, who came from a very
orthodox home, decided that I should not have a bris. Years later, while at
university in Illinois, I made arrangements with a mohel in Chicago to have this
procedure performed.

The German government, in its generosity, provided reparation pensions to my
parents. This was called the Wiedergutmachung (literally meaning making good
again). I still accompanied my frail father in his nineties to the German
embassy on a yearly basis so he could present himself to an official and
continue receiving his making-it-good-again pension.

I know very little about my father's harrowing experiences ? but I knew that he
had two older brothers, Yaakov and Naphtali. Over the years, I have regularly
been searching holocaust databases in an attempt to find some trace of them. Two
years ago, I ran across a testimonial, on the Yad Vashem webpage, containing a
photo that was the exact likeness of my father as a young man. I could not
believe how much he looked like my father. No first name ? just identified as
Lander, from Lvov. There were also testimonials pages with photos of his wife,
Regina Lander, and a little boy, Mundek. Associated with these was the name of
the person in Israel who had provided the testimony of their deaths in 1942.
After some further research, I was able to determine that this was indeed my
father's brother, Naphtali and his family. Having grown up in a very nuclear
family, I cannot express the elation I felt in having found these photos of my
uncle, aunt and cousin. I look at these photos often and wonder what if ...

Emil