[Click the photo for a larger image. Opens in a new window.]

Name of the exhibit: Photos of Relatives

Submitted by: Elliot

Date of origin: Unknown

Origin of the object: Kolomiyya, Ukraine; Minsk, Russia

Description: These photos are of my late great-grandmother and my late grandfather. They were both affected by the Holocaust in different ways, even though they lived in North America at the time.

Voyage to Ottawa: Unknown

[Click photos for larger images. Opens in a new window.]

Name of the exhibit: Photo, documents, and articles (maternal side of the family)

Submitted by: Les Grumach

Date of origin: 1942

Origin of the object: This is a photo taken in the Krakow ghetto in Poland. It shows my maternal grandfather, Salo Langer, and some other Jews being forced to shovel snow under the direction of the Nazis. He is on the side, holding the shovel over his shoulder.

Description: During the Nazi occupation of Poland, my grandfather and his family were warned a day before the liquidation of the ghetto. They managed to escape and take their niece Lily Broder with them as well. They all spoke German fluently as well as Polish, which probably helped them survive. In 1946, after the Kielce pogrom, they decided to emigrate. Fortunately they had some funds waiting in London as Salo had been an agent for a Swiss watch company. They managed to get to Marseilles and sailed on a ship called the Monkey to Sydney, Australia. My grandmother was a great business woman, trading in antiques and fine arts in Poland. When they moved to Melbourne, she started an antique business called “House of Art”.

Voyage to Ottawa: Salo Langer, his wife Guta (Katzner), and their daughter Alicia emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1946. The photo came into my possession after my parents died and has been with me ever since.

[Click photos for larger images. Opens in a new window.]

Name of the exhibit: Photographs of Dusia’s Friends and Classmates, Fajn Family History

Submitted by: Rosalind Conway

Date of origin: July 13, 1936

Origin of the object: My mother saved photographs of her classmates, and of her best friend Ruta. They all perished in the Holocaust. Ruta sent a postcard of herself to my mother in Rumania, where my mother was living because of my grandmother’s asthma. The written account details how my grandfather took my mother and Uncle Romek Fein (still alive in Israel and now 99) to Palestine. He returned to Rumania and was arrested. His business partner was shot. He left everything behind and was able to leave with a British Laissez Passer.

Description: My mother had the photographs with her in Israel, eventually she emigrated to England, and later to the U.S. and Canada. She had the pictures in her room at Hillel Lodge. She always carried the picture of her classmates from the School in ƁódĆș in her purse, and had hoped she would find a living classmate. She never did. Her account details how her family lost everything, and the guilt she carried for the rest of her life for having survived. She died April 21, 2018, at 98. My father, Theodore David Cohen, was named after Herzl, as his father (Rosalind’s grandfather) was Herzl’s secretary; to hide his Jewish identity at work, her father changed the family name to Conway, a name he found in the London telephone directory.

The photographs were taken in ƁódĆș, in central Poland, a major industrial city.

Voyage to Ottawa: My mother brought the photographs with her when she immigrated to Canada.

[Click the photos for a larger images. Opens in a new window.]

Name of the exhibit: “I recognized myself only because of the number”

Submitted by: Hilda Bleyer and family

Date of origin: After liberation, January 27, 1945

Origin of the object: “Auschwitz: A History in Photographs”, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1993, (ISBN 8305126439). First published in Polish in 1990 as “Auschwitz: Crime Against Humanity” compiled and edited by Teresa Sweibocka.

Description: The photograph (on page 105 in the book) shows an emaciated 14-year-old Jewish boy from Hungary, identified only by a prisoner number. It was taken during a medical examination after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviet Army in January 1945.

Voyage to Ottawa: Stephen (István) Bleyer, was a 64-year-old Holocaust survivor, an architect and the President of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. He was an active advocate for Holocaust education and frequently shared his experiences with many different audiences and particularly with students. In January 1994, Stephen walked into a local bookstore where he noticed a new book: “Auschwitz: A History in Photographs”. He picked it up and, leafing through its pages, discovered this photograph of a 14-year-old boy identified only by a number – B14615. It is the same number Stephen had tattooed on his arm; it is his first glimpse of himself as a child at Auschwitz.

“Je ne cherche pas Ă  expliquer ce genre de chose. Mais je suis content que cette photo existe comme preuve supplĂ©mentaire de ce que j’ai vĂ©cu, de ce que des hommes ont fait Ă  d’autres hommes.” Stephen Bleyer in Le Devoir
(“I can’t really explain this. But I’m glad that this picture exists as further proof of what I lived through, what some people have done to others.”)

Shortly after discovering the photograph, Stephen wrote to Teresa Swiebocka, the senior curator at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and editor of the book. The photograph, the response from Jerzy Wroblewski, the Director of the Museum, and the archival documents including a German list of prisoners, a Polish Red Cross list of survivors and Soviet medical records Stephen received from the Museum, help to tell the story of how he survived the end of the war.

As Stephen told the Montreal Gazette, “I had two feet that were frozen with open wounds. I wasn’t in a position to walk and I was very weak” and so he avoided the Death March that marked the Nazis abandonment of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with 2,500 others, he was left to die in the camp ‘hospital’. But the German attempt to set fire to the remaining camp buildings failed and Stephen lived to see a Soviet officer arrive: “he was wearing a white cape and told us in Russian that we were free.”

Despite the state of his seriously infected feet, a lung infection (pleurisy) and his 23.5 kg weight as a result of starvation, three months after liberation Stephen would recover enough to travel back to Hungary.

In the year following his discovery of the photograph, Stephen was a frequent voice in the media for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was now sharing his story and the lessons he had drawn from his experience with a much wider audience. Sadly, Stephen passed away in March 1997.

After several years in Hungary and then as a Displaced Person in Italy, Stephen Bleyer arrived in Montreal in 1951, he married Hilda Agulnick Bleyer in 1961, and they had two children. Hilda later moved to Ottawa where she is an active volunteer with the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship (CHES).