Holocaust witnesses will soon cease to exist. As Tolstoy famously put it, “What is to be done?” One answer is Out of Hiding, a cross-section of stories collected from one region of the globe — British Columbia, Canada — examining 85 authors and 160 books. Outstanding characters include the heroic whistleblower, Rudolf Vrba, credited by historian Sir Martin Gilbert with saving at least 200,000 lives, as well as Robbie Waisman, likely the only person ever to sneak his way into Nazi prison camps, twice. Other discoveries include Dr. Tom Perry’s never-published photos of just-liberated Buchenwald, a little-known Warsaw Ghetto memoir by Stanislav Adler and Jennie Lifschitz, perhaps the only Canadian-born Jew to have survived the camps.
You may read more about this book and order it here.
For independent coverage about this book, see the Jewish Independent newspaper for “Roadmap to Remembering.”
As well, there is a Georgia Straight review here, “A collage of B.C. Perspectives.”
Click on this image to read a larger version of an interview with The Province.
Click on this image to see the larger pdf
You may read Norman Ravvin’s review of Out of Hiding in the British Columbia Review here.
BC Studies Review of Out of Hiding.
The Jewish Independent review of Out of Hiding.
Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia
By Alan Twigg, Ronsdale Press
Since the late 1940s, Jewish Holocaust survivors have come to B.C. and gradually felt inclined, or obliged, to write books about their experiences, creating a rich homegrown literature.
Now, Alan Twigg has compiled a valuable overview, Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia, that comprehensively covers published work related to 86 B.C. authors and 163 books, including memoirs, scholarly non-fiction, novels, poetry and short stories.
The book’s foreword quotes a Vancouver Holocaust survivor who said, “All we know and learn from the Holocaust strengthens us, as we may confront other genocides elsewhere or in the making.” This observation seems powerful today, given events in Ukraine.
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Alan Twigg—who has just received an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University—is not Jewish or German. He explains the urgency of getting Out of Hiding into the hands of schools and libraries across the province.
“I’m not interested in preaching to the choir, and I have no political or religious agenda. I believe strongly that it’s everyone’s responsibility to know more than just a little about the Holocaust, and our collective responsibility to teach our children.
“Confrontation with evil is a universal subject, and nowhere in living memory is this confrontation more undeniable than the Holocaust. With each new horror or genocide, we are pushing down the Holocaust in the midden of human history. Soon it will not be in living memory.”
Twigg’s belief that the Holocaust “is by far the lowest level to which the human race has ever sunk” started when he was around ten or twelve, while viewing newsreel footage on CBC television of a bulldozer pushing piles of emaciated, naked corpses, probably at the Bergen Belsen camp.
As publisher and chief writer of B.C. BookWorld for 33 years, Twigg developed a reference for some 12,500 B.C. authors, enabling him to uniquely keep track of Holocaust-related titles. Hence, he felt obliged to share his uniquely pervasive knowledge, augmented a thoughtful Afterword on the nature of hiding by Yosef Wosk.
Easily the most significant B.C.-related book in the global context was Rudolf Vrba’s I Cannot Forgive, later revised as I Escaped from Auschwitz. One of only five Jews who escaped the massive Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, Vrba and fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler arrived back in Slovakia, where they compiled a detailed report in 1944 on the Nazi atrocities they witnessed.
The pair’s uniquely persuasive and non-emotional report was circulated to Allied governments, and ultimately helped to save the lives of at least 100,000 of Jews in Hungary (according to the pre-eminent WW II historian Sir Martin Gilbert). Vrba became a UBC professor of pharmacology and Twigg met him in 2001. Twigg is now interviewing everyone who knew Vrba for a documentary.
Also hugely significant, Dutch-born Dr. Robert Krell, a UBC psychiatrist, has gathered the stories of countless traumatized survivors and co-founded the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. In 1942, at the age of two, his parents placed him in hiding under the care of a Christian neighbor. Unlike most Dutch Jews, his parents survived to reclaim the boy when the war was over—hence Krell always felt he had two mothers.
Krell’s revised autobiography, Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher, was co-launched with Out of Hiding in April at an event moderated by Wosk.
Perhaps most remarkable, the child survivor Robbie Waisman snuck his way into concentration camps—twice. In Boy From Buchenwald he recalls being rehabilitated in France after the war alongside future Nobel Prize awardee Elie Wiesel.
Many Holocaust survivors got on with their lives and became successful in different endeavours, though Twigg is correct to warn about what he calls the “nice-ification” of the Holocaust. Out of Hiding takes pains not a sanitized view of history. For instance, Leon Kahn’s No Time to Mourn is a harrowing account of an armed anti-Nazi partisan who witnessed a horrific mass slaughter of Jews as a boy. On page 173, there’s a photo of the newly-dead Heinrich Himmler, architect of the death camps, lying on the floor of the British 2nd Army HQ after his suicide with a cyanide capsule.
Featured on the book’s cover, Vancouverite Jenny Lifschitz is probably the only Canadian-born Jew (and therefore a Canadian citizen) who survived the concentration camps. As described by her daughter, the writer and translator Rachel Mines, Jenny came to Vancouver in the early fifties after returning to her Montreal birthplace in 1946—before other Jews were allowed to emigrate.
Widowed in 1982, Rachel remarried to Jack Phillips, a contributor to the Communist newspaper Tribune, and the couple visited the remains of the Nazi transit camp of Theresienstadt on Remembrance Day, November 11, 1983.
Scholarly accounts besides Mines’ include Adera Goldberg’s study of the 35,000 Jewish survivors who came to Canada in the decade after the war, Holocaust Survivors in Canada, and Eva Hoffman’s Shtetl and her Lost in Translation, an insightful account of the language transitions familiar to immigrants.
Out of Hiding is an encyclopedic reference work packed with information While some perspectives offer a vivid picture of what can happen when humans hit rock bottom, there are also stories of hope and redemption.
As a superb liar and an excellent tease, Helene Moszkiewiez infiltrated Brussels Gestapo headquarters and served the Resistance for six years. Her memoir Inside the Gestapo was the basis for two movies, Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek [aka Black Book] and the TV movie A Woman at War starring Martha Plimpton.
Today, surveys show that accurate knowledge of the Holocaust is often spotty at best. It’s safe to say that for most British Columbians, the Holocaust was and is now very distant, separated by time and geography. How many people know that the Canadian government admitted only about 5000 desperate Jewish refugees between Hitler’s takeover of Germany in 1933 and the end of the war and Holocaust in 1945?
All high-school students and their parents should be provided with access to this invaluable book.
Gene Homel is a former chair of the Liberal Studies department at Langara where he has also taught Holocaust Studies.
