90-year-old has comfort all stitched up
Auschwitz survivor makes squares that become afghans for women, kids
It has not been the easiest season for Liselotte Ivry. In November, she tripped on a staircase at home and broke her hip. Then after surgery for a partial joint replacement, she had hallucinations that caused her to believe that she was back in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp she had survived more than 70 years earlier — and that “everybody around me was a killer.”
It was a horrible ordeal. “I didn’t think I would come back from it.”
But she has. At 90, after nearly two months in a rehabilitation centre, the longtime community volunteer and former art teacher is in her own home once again; once again she is cooking and baking for herself, reading and watching the news. And knitting. For years now, Ivry has been knitting squares for afghans destined for the women and children of the Auberge Shalom pour femmes shelter. She has knitted hundred and hundreds. The project began at the Shaare Zion Congregation, where Ivry is a member, “and has been a running project for as long as I can remember,” said community volunteer and fellow synagogue member Edna Janco, who crochets Ivry’s squares together into the afghans.
“I cannot keep count of how many afghans have been donated,” she said. “The others drifted off, but Liselotte stuck with it ... and I wanted to honour her. She is just a marvel of a person to do this.”
Earlier this month, representatives from Auberge Shalom picked up 29 women’s, children’s and baby-sized afghans from Ivry’s home — the largest size requires 49 squares; the smallest nine — and they were distributed to the women and children at the shelter on March 8, International Women’s Day.
The afghans “are not only beautiful, but they are also soft,” said Auberge Shalom executive director Diane Sasson. And the idea of people coming together to do something nice for the shelter population “is so meaningful and special for us. For the women, it’s knowing that there is a community out there.”
Ivry learned to knit, crochet and sew in Grade 3 — and even as a child was able to design and knit sweaters for herself. Knitting squares for the afghans is a way “to do something for the community — even from home,” Ivry said. “I think anything you do with your hands is good ... and if I am nervous, the knitting kind of calms me.”
Ivry was born Liselotte Epstein in 1925 in Listany, a small village in what is now the Czech Republic. Her father died when she was 3½, and she and her younger brother were raised by their mother, who ran a general store. She remembers an idyllic childhood of picking berries, playing soccer, sleigh riding in winter and swimming in summer with the geese and ducks in the pond in front of the house.
But that idyll would end all to soon. On Oct. 1, 1938, Adolf Hitler and the armies of Nazi Germany crossed into the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia. By month’s end, the family was living with relatives in Prague. The following March, the Germans walked into Prague “and we were not allowed to go to school after that,” Ivry recalled. In time, Jews were not permitted in parks or movie houses or even on the sidewalk; they could shop only at certain hours. “Every day there was something new.”
The roundups of Jews began; in September 1942, Ivry’s family was sent to the concentration camp of Terezin, north of Prague; from there, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Her mother, weakened and ill, perished in Auschwitz on Jan. 4, 1944; her brother, Hans, was taken to the gas chamber on March 8. When she saw him the day before and offered him her mittens, he replied: “Where I am going, you don’t need mittens,” Ivry recalled in testimony about her Holocaust experience for the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.
A few months later Ivry stood naked with others before Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious SS officer and physician at Auschwitz responsible for selecting victims for the gas chambers or for deadly human experiments. Among those “chosen to live,” she was sent to labour camps in Hamburg and, in early 1945, transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she remained until it was liberated by the British army on April 15. She was 19 — and she had lost her entire immediate family.
In 1949, after a four-year wait for a visa, she made her way to Montreal, where she had an uncle. The following year she married Sidney Ivry; they raised two children and become grandparents and great-grandparents before his death in 1996.
Along the way, Ivry earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and literature in 1974 from what was then Loyola College and taught art to preschoolers for 13 years. She also volunteered with organizations including Canadian Hadassah-WIZO in Montreal and the Cummings Jewish Centre for Seniors.
But the volunteer job that will doubtless have the most enduring effect is her work as a speaker for the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. In that capacity, Ivry visited Montreal-area schools and travelled as far afield as New York and Saskatchewan and spoke to thousands of young people about her experiences during the Holocaust. In 2007 she published I’m Their Voice!, a compilation of letters, poems and drawings from students she encountered.
Ivry has said on many occasions that she believes she survived to be a witness to history — to be a voice for those who perished in the Holocaust. “I feel we are all put on this Earth for a certain purpose — and I was chosen to speak for the 6 million whose voices were stilled.”