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