When good overcomes evil
Message of love — and warning — in Holocaust survivor’s story
Eva Kuper is a tiny woman. Standing at the front of a cavernous hall at the Montreal Holocaust Museum, she was not much taller than the 10-year-olds seated before her.
But as she spoke, her mighty presence commanded attention of her audience, even without the aid of a microphone.
“The story I’m about to tell you is not made of my own memories,” she began, as a hush fell over the group of students visiting the museum.
Kuper, 76, is a Holocaust survivor who has lived in Montreal since 1949. She herself remembers very little of her early childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. But her life story, pieced together over more than 70 years, is a powerful example of love triumphing over evil.
It is a tale that deserves telling and retelling in an era where humanity is still struggling to come to grips with one of its darkest hours. And it serves as a warning, with a dangerous brand of politics on the rise again, to not let a tragic period of history repeat itself.
To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, this is Kuper’s account, summarized from her talk to Royal Vale School students last Thursday.
Kuper was born in Warsaw in 1940, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Months after her birth, Kuper, her father, Antek, and her mother, Fela, were confined to the Jewish Ghetto. About 20 square blocks of the city that had previously held about 30,000 inhabitants now imprisoned as many as 400,000 Jews behind a 10-foot wall topped with barbed wire.
Conditions were squalid. Disease was rampant. Food was scarce. Residents were forced into slave labour.
By 1942, the Nazis began to liquidate the ghetto. Jews were periodically rounded up and taken to the Umschlagplatz, a holding area near the railway tracks, where they were loaded onto trains and taken away.
“The cattle cars were packed so tightly, if someone fainted or died, they could not fall,” Kuper said.
Kuper’s father was a chemist who was forced to work at a fur factory. One day, he and all the other men were locked in the yard for six hours without explanation. But worried for his family, he managed to place a furtive call to his wife’s cousin and best friend, Regina.
Regina was able to run from her job to the Umschlagplatz in time to see Kuper and her mother being loaded into a cattle car with hundreds of other women and children.
Regina screamed over the crowd: “Stop, that’s my baby!”
“And somehow,” said Kuper, “my mother was permitted to pass me hand to hand, hand to hand, out of the train to Regina. The doors closed and nobody ever saw my mother again.”
Today we know that the Jews put on those trains were taken to concentration camps where they were gassed, subjected to horrific medical experiments, starved or worked into the grave.
While it has always been asserted that the extent of the Nazi-orchestrated genocide became apparent only after the war, a new trove of previously secret United Nations evidence suggests otherwise. The documents, made public last week after more than 70 years, show world leaders knew what was happening as early as 1942. And still no one acted.
After her mother was shipped to Treblinka, Kuper, then age two, and her father tried to avoid the same fate. There were many close calls.
One night, she said, her father had to hide with her in a crowded basement half-filled with water.
“My father held me all night — like this — above the water,” Kuper said, stretching her arms out in front of her almost at shoulder level. But, she explained, the other people hiding in the cellar didn’t want a child there who might cry and give them all away.
“My father begged and pleaded with them. And finally he said, ‘I will hold her against me and if she cries, I will suffocate her myself,” said Kuper.
Her father, she added, always carried two poison pills with him, planning to end their lives quickly, together, if they were ever caught.
“Can you imagine these choices? Can you imagine my mother’s choice when she handed me off ?” she asked the students. “My mother knew if she kept me with her, I would die.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah as it’s known in Hebrew, is being marked in Canada during a period of renewed global uncertainty. Xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism and homophobia are being stoked again by far-right politicians.
Holocaust denial, or minimization, is becoming alarmingly mainstream. In a statement to mark an international day of commemoration in January, U.S. President Donald Trump omitted any mention of the 6 million Jews who were killed. The White House press secretary recently claimed “even Hitler never used chemical weapons,” an atrocious statement for which he later tried to apologize. Campaigning for the French presidency, Front National leader Marine Le Pen recently negated France’s complicity in deporting Jews to Auschwitz.
Kuper is aware her message has a new level of urgency.
“The demagogy, the lies, the right-wing parties in countries like Europe and America now — it’s very scary. And for the older people, the survivors who remember the Holocaust, it must be even more scary because they’ve seen it before,” she said. “It looks like that and it feels like that.”
Eventually, Kuper and her father escaped the Warsaw Ghetto by the only possible exit route: the sewers. They made a three-hour journey through the filthy, fetid tunnels and were taken in by old friends of her parents. Her father’s sister was also living outside the ghetto, posing as a Pole by using false identity papers.
Kuper’s father made an agonizing decision. He didn’t want to put his friends at risk. And he knew it was dangerous to try to hide with a child. So Kuper was sent to live with a kindly woman who was already caring for a Polish child orphaned by the war.
But the woman struggled to feed the girls. Eventually, she begged a group of nuns who looked after blind children to take them in. So Kuper spent the rest of the war with the sisters.
She remembers a bit of this time, she said, like having to hide, curled up in a ball in a hole under the floorboards of the cellar when the Nazis showed up, or bringing the precious milk cow in from the pasture each night as a wee girl of three.
What she remembers more clearly is her father’s sister coming to find her when the war finally ended.
“I remember her coming to get me because I was more than five,” Kuper said. “I was a child of war and I always did what I was told.”
Amazingly, Kuper’s father had also survived, and the two were reunited.
“I didn’t remember my father,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him since
I was two.”
But feeling it was still too dangerous for Jews in Sovietoccupied Poland, he concealed Kuper’s true identity, even from her. For the next few years, she went to Catholic school, attended mass on Sundays with the housekeeper and even made her First Communion. She also absorbed the rampant anti-Semitism she was exposed to at school.
Finally in 1949, Kuper, her father and her new stepmother, immigrated to Montreal. Only on the ship on the way across the Atlantic did Kuper’s father finally tell her the truth: she was Jewish.
“I was appalled, I was upset. I said ‘I’m not Jewish. Maybe you are, but I’m not!’” she said. “It took me many years to fell comfortable with my Jewish identity, to feel pride.”
Kuper’s Holocaust testimonial does not end with starting a new life in Canada, however. There was another chapter to be uncovered before the true miracle of her survival was fully revealed. But that would take another five decades.
In Canada, Kuper thrived. She attended Sir George Williams University and Concordia University. She embarked on a career in education. She served as principal of Jewish Peoples’ Schools and Peretz Schools. She married and had three children of her own.
Growing up, she didn’t speak much with her father or stepmother about their Holocaust experiences.
“I did not want to know. I did not want to hear these stories,” Kuper said. “I did not want the burden.”
She did learn her own story, but in fits and starts — a memory recounted here, an anecdote told there. Only months before her father died in 1987 did she finally record his war experiences in chronological order.
But eventually Kuper’s own daughter, then age 18 and named for her murdered grandmother, began insisting her mother fill in the blanks of those lost war years. So when she retired in 2005, Kuper returned to Warsaw.
Through her own research and a serious of fortuitous encounters, she discovered the monastery in Luski, Poland, where she had been sheltered by the Franciscan sisters. And most incredible, she learned that one of her saviours, Sister Klara Jaroszynska, was still alive, now age 94.
“I did not remember this woman. I did not remember her voice. I did not remember her face. But I remembered her love,” Kuper recalled of their emotional reunion. “I ran into her arms and she held me and I held her. And she cried. We both cried.”
And that’s when the missing pieces of Kuper’s life finally came into focus.
“She told me something that was very important. It changed my life.”
As the woman who had first cared for Kuper stood in the road, begging the nuns to take her in, the tiny child threw her arms around Sister Klara’s leg and said ‘Pick me up.’
“(Sister Klara) picked me up and cuddled me to her shoulder and she fell in love with me. She said God had sent me to her and she had to take care of me,” Kuper recounted. “She gave me the gift of life because she saved my life. She also gave me the gift of love. As a child of three with no one to love them for three years, her love at that time allowed me to grow up into the person I am today.”
Kuper learned that Sister Klara’s bravery had already been honoured by the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance centre in Israel by the time she’d found her. She, herself, was the missing link in this story of heroism.
Kuper rekindled a relationship with the nun and visited her several times before she died in 2010. While Sister Klara was still alive, their story was featured in Kirsten Esch’s documentary Hidden Children, Unknown Heroes.
Since then Kuper has recorded her testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project and contributed her story to the one of the Azrieli Foundation’s anthologies of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs.
As a retired educator, Kuper has a particular knack for explaining the events of the Holocaust to young people, be they grade-schoolers or college students. She answers their questions patiently, even gives them her email address in case they think of anything they want to ask later, and dispenses hugs at the end of her presentation.
As Kuper’s talk drew to a close, one of the students raised her hand.
“What happened to Regina?” the girl asked tentatively, inquiring about the fate of her mother’s cousin who had rescued her from the train.
“She followed my mother to Treblinka two years later,” Kuper said. “She, too, was murdered.”
Where once she was reluctant to delve into her own tragic past, Kuper now sees it as her duty to bear witness to the horror — before that important work is left to history books and museum displays alone.
“You are the last generation of young people to actually get to hear from someone who survived the war and have them tell you their story,” she told the students. “You have a great responsibility.”
Can you imagine these choices? Can you imagine my mother’s choice when she handed me off? My mother knew if she kept me with her, I would die.