Holocaust remembered at Sydney synagogue
Toronto physician recounts childhood as son of concentration camp survivors
Allan Rosenfeld’s voice cracked as he described how his mother ate grass to survive when she was a young Jewish girl on the run from the Nazis.
The Toronto doctor and author was just minutes into his address and already the audience of about 200 people at Sydney’s Temple Sons of Israel Synagogue was soberly captivated as he recalled his upbringing as a child of two Holocaust survivors.
The sombre story of his mother Zelda’s desperate fight for survival further enraptured his silent listeners as he told of how at the age of 14 she was sent by her own mother into the forest where she spent six weeks in hiding.
“Cold and starving, she survived by hiding in a tree which she marked with a kerchief only to come down at night in the dark looking for something to eat — she talked of building a nest of branches to keep warm and of trying to eat grass to survive,” said Rosenfeld, the keynote speaker at a Holocaust memorial service held Sunday afternoon at the Whitney Avenue synagogue.
But as difficult as his mother Zelda’s hardships may have been, it became much worse for the Polish girl who was captured and sent to the German concentration and extermination camp at Majdanek. By a stroke of luck, she narrowly escaped death when a former teacher recognized her and assigned her to a work detail. However, like her future husband Lazar, the young Zelda was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
“I have never known a grandparent, an uncle, an aunt or even a first cousin. Sure, I would later discover second cousins sprinkled in Israel, the United States and, most recently, Australia, but for my entire youth my reality and my family was my parents and my two brothers,” said the 59-year-old Rosenfeld, an occupational health expert and family physician in Mississauga, Ont., who in 2015 authored “Holocaust Lumber,” a book chronicling his childhood years as the son of Holocaust survivors.
“I felt the need to share my experiences growing up in a reality shaped by two survivors of the Holocaust — it was the day-today existence of working in the family business, a lumber yard, that their terrible sufferings were disclosed consciously and subconsciously and without a single word being mentioned by the events they had experienced and witnessed in Poland.”
Rosenfeld said his father never talked of his time in the concentration camps and his mother, who is now 92 years old, only began to speak of it after her husband died in 2008.
“She never talked about it and she always told me and my siblings that she didn’t want to burden us with her nightmares — she didn’t understand how her experiences would filter down and impact her children in so many ways,” he said, adding that family life went on in front of a background of love and tension.
In concluding his address to an audience that included top-ranking members of the Cape Breton Regional Police Service who lit ceremonial candles in memory of the Holocaust, Rosenfeld explained why felt compelled to share his experiences.
“As time passes the survivors of the Holocaust are dying — I do not want the concept of the Holocaust to be forgotten, I want the world to remember,” he said of the Second World War genocide in which approximately six million European Jews were exterminated as part of Nazi Germany’s so-called “Final Solution.”
Sunday’s Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) service also included an invocation by Rev. Bill Burke of Sydney’s Marguerite Bourgeoys Catholic
Church, the Mourner’s Kaddish by local businessman Martin Chernin and musical selections by the Bouldarderie Lakeview Choir led by Joella Foulds. Representatives of various Cape Breton churches were also in attendance along with members of the general public.