Jeanne Beker to discuss parents’ brave story
Trail-blazing fashion journalist Jeanne Beker will bear witness on Monday in Ottawa to the courage and suffering of her parents — Holocaust survivors who hid in fields, barns and underground bunkers to escape genocide in wartime Poland.
Beker, best known as the longtime host of Fashion Television, grew up in a household where the Holocaust was a vivid part of her everyday life.
“I remember hiding under the bed because I didn’t want to hear any more of their stories,” Beker said in a recent interview. “They talked about it incessantly, the horrible stuff that happened to them during the war.”
Many Holocaust survivors didn’t want to relive their wartime nightmares, but Joseph and Bronia Beker were different. “They didn’t have anyone except me and my sister (Marilyn),” said Beker. “For them, I think they had to keep talking about it as a form of therapy.”
Beker now considers her parents’ stories a personal responsibility. Her father died in 1988, and her mother — the family’s most dedicated storyteller — died in May 2015.
“She isn’t here to tell her story, so it’s really important to keep it out there in her memory: It has become our family legacy.”
Beker will discuss her parents’ experience and its impact on her life during an event Monday hosted by the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at Carleton University.
Everyone who attends will receive a copy of Joy Runs Deeper, the book written by Joseph and Bronia Beker and published by the Azrieli Foundation.
The memoir unfolds a story of unspeakable horror, bravery and resilience.
Bronia and Joseph both grew up in Kozowa, a small Polish town with a vibrant Jewish community.
They met and fell in love as war loomed in Europe. He joined the Polish army, but after invading German forces quickly overwhelmed it in September 1939, he returned to Kozowa, which had been occupied by the Russians in keeping with terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
In June 1941, German dictator Adolf Hitler abandoned the deal and attacked the Soviet Union across a broad front. Within weeks, the Germans moved into Kozowa.
The town’s 2,000 Jews were ordered to live in a small section of land, and their movements were restricted. Food became scarce and disease spread. The Germans then began rounding up Jews and shooting them. The survivors built underground bunkers to hide from the Nazi raids.
The following year, deportations began as Nazi death camps launched the Final Solution.
In April 1943, when the Germans surrounded Kozowa’s ghetto, Bronia and nine members of her family gathered in an underground bunker built beneath their cellar floor. Hours into their ordeal, they could hear soldiers digging to find them.
The soldiers didn’t unearth the hiding spot, but their shovelling covered the pipes that fed air into the bunker. Bronia passed out as she watched her father praying and her brother desperately trying to open the entrance door with a hammer. She woke up in bed the next day to find out that all nine members of her family had suffocated before she was pulled from the grave. “I was alone. I became wild with grief,” she remembered in her memoir.
From then on, she said, Joseph took care of her. He decided they had to flee the ghetto, and arranged to build another bunker beneath a farmer’s chicken coop.
They lived in that bunker for nine months with another couple, emerging only at night to move about the barn. Hungry and desperate, they spent the final months of the war moving to different bunkers and barn lofts.
“Joseph kept reminding me, ‘Never give up,’ ” Bronia wrote. “It was so hard — I just wanted to go the police and surrender. At least the Germans shot you in the head, and it seemed to me that to die this way was easy.” After the war, Bronia and Joseph spent three years in a displaced persons camp before immigrating to Canada and settling in Toronto. He worked in a factory before launching a successful slipper-making company. Beker said her parents’ Holocaust experience shaped her life. Like many second-generation survivors, she inherited trauma from her parents, but drew resolve in equal parts.
“I can look back and say it probably informed everything I ever did. Without question, I attribute those stories to making me who I am: They certainly gave me my drive ... I had the responsibility of having this fantabulous life to make up for all of the dreams that my parents could never realize.”
Beker said she pursued a career in the arts to tell stories and celebrate the power of the human spirit. Nurtured on the darkest stories imaginable, she spent her working life in the world’s fashion capitals surrounded by beauty and frivolity.
“It was the most exquisite balancing act imaginable,” she said