Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 20:00:49 -0500
From: "Marc Raboy, Dr." 

These stories are incredibly moving - thank you so much for them. As many have mentioned, it's amazing that no one ever talked about the Holocaust when we were in high school. We knew of course that some of our friends/classmates were survivors but, as we were kids, it seemed probably less relevant than what your father did for a living. Ours was a broadly "antifascist" family so I knew early on that the Nazis had hated Jews and we were glad they were defeated - but it almost seemed like an abstract notion. My father's family's reference point was the pogroms of the old Russian Empire that they had escaped; my mother's family were what we would now call economic refugees from inter-war Poland; they all arrived in Canada and the US around 1920. 

My father and my three uncles had been in the armed forces and gone overseas so there was a lot of talk at family gatherings about "the war" but I don't remember it ever becoming more focussed than that. Incredible to say I think it was similar even at the Jewish Peoples School I attended before Strathcona/OHS (Henry and Bernie, I'd be curious to know if you remember differently). Even in a Jewish day school in the 1950s we were not confronted squarely with the human horror of the holocaust; maybe the school didn't want to traumatize us or add to the trauma of those kids who were survivors. 

That said, the most unforgettable sequence of teachers I ever had were the three survivors who taught me in grades 5, 6, and 7 - MM. Hellman, Chusid, and Trepman. To their great credit and my lasting enrichment, they taught us about the bountiful Jewish life and culture in Europe and world Jewish history (JPS was a secular school founded by Yiddishists in the 1920s - my father was a student in the first graduating class). I don't remember any of them ever discussing what they had been through personally - with one stunning exception that I will never forget. Paul Trepman was the founder and Canadian president of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (a really tough guy, believe me!) and he loved to talk about Jewish life in Warsaw before the war. One day he was carrying on, perhaps a bit at length, about how wonderful it had been and one of my grade 7 classmates piped up "So why don't you go back to Poland?" Paul calmly walked over to the boy and smacked him across the face. Then walked back to his desk and continued his story. Nothing was ever said about the event.

Thank you again to those who are sharing these stories.

Marc