Passage To Canada
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<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td width="466" class="font2"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p class="font2"><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td><p align="justify" class="font2">By Moses Znaimer (page 1 of 3)<br><br></p></td> <td align="right" class="font2b"><p class="font2"><a href="passages_moses_bio.asp"><img src="images/main/bio_button.jpg" border="0"></a><br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('peace_movie_moses.asp',250,250)"><img src="images/about/movies_moses.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10"></a>We arrived in Canada in May of 1948: Father, Mother and me. ThatÕs all that was left. We were post war (WWII) refugees from a ÒDisplaced PersonsÓ camp outside a town called Kastle in Germany. Just getting to that DP camp had been a saga involving two frightened Jewish kids, barely out of their teens, on the run from the Nazis, each the survivor of a substantial family, who had been thrown together by the fortunes of war, and had me in the middle of it all.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top" height="110"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses1.asp',510,463)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image1.jpg" border="0" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a>It is difficult to be sure whether what we think of as our earliest memories are actual memories, or stories we were told when very young. Perhaps a picture of such a story forms in the imagination of a child and, over time, takes on the detail and gravitas of memory. As is the case with many Canadians today, my earliest memories -- whether stories told to me long ago or images that are truly remembered -- have to do with the passage from a troubled place to a place of refuge.<br><br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses2.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image2.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a>I live and work in and out of Toronto, a city that has become, to an exciting degree, a city of immigrants. When I step out of the ChumCityBuilding and walk along Queen Street West, I'm forever amazed at just how wonderfully diverse T.O. has become. But how many of those passers-by, I also wonder, are visited by stressful memories of uncertain journeys, anticipation, fear? People born and raised here can barely be aware of how many of their fellow citizens carry with them echoes of tragic events and places that seem all but impossible within our experience, here, in the "Peaceable Kingdom."<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses3.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image3.jpg" border="0" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a><p align="justify" class="font2">That's why I'm so proud of the strength my parents showed in completing the journey from that shattered old world to the promise of this new one. During that journey, how many times did Chaja and Aron swallow what must have been overwhelming dread, and press on? How many times did they look at their infant son and wonder what on earth the future could possibly hold for him? For them? I often think that one of our great strengths is the simple courage that so many now-quiet, now-ordinary citizens showed in just getting here.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses4.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image4.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a><p align="justify" class="font2">My mother Chaja was Polish and my father, Aron was born in Kuldiga, Latvia, where his family was in the shoe business. He escaped on a borrowed bicycle minutes after hearing the Nazis were invading. It was June 22, 1941. Chaja was born in Dubienka, and spent her teenage years in Lodz, where the family owned a stocking factory. Despite Chaja's "bourgeois" background, when the Russians occupied, because of her education, she got work in a munitions factory and was evacuated to the Soviet Union as the Germans advanced. By the time she got together with Aron, she had acquired a Komsommol (Communist Youth) card, an indispensable entrŽe to jobs and rations, and had done a stint in a Kolkhoz (collective farm). She escaped with the help of an older man who fancied her. She then escaped from him too and, ever the confident one, approached Aron on a boat leaving Markstadt, when she heard him humming a familiar Yiddish tune.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses5.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image5.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a><p align="justify" class="font2">Thus they began an epic journey of survival, moving constantly, east and south, marrying, and having their first child, Moses, moi, in Kulab, Tajikistan, one of the Central Asian Union Republics of the former USSR. Aron had foresight. He always knew when it was time to leave, and at each stop they left behind young colleagues they would never see again. Chaja was shrewd and had a magical way of making friends.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_moses6.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_moses_image6.jpg" border="0" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a><p align="justify" class="font2">At that time Aron worked in a granary and found himself framed for giving short measure. It turned out someone had tampered with the scales. It was wartime and the penalty was death. He was arrested and interrogated by the dreaded NKVD (secret police). Chaja, all of 4"10" and ninety pounds, bullied her way into a meeting with the prosecutor's wife. This connection and the gift of Aron's only valuable possession, a St. Moritz pen, secured his release and bought them enough time to finger the real culprit.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p align="justify" class="font2">Because Aron had the foresight to use Chaja's surname, Epelzweig, instead of his own, the family was able to get out of The USSR when Polish nationals were repatriated after the war. Poland remained relatively porous and relatively easy to get out of until the Iron Curtain was finally, firmly brought down in 47/48. So it was that a midnight rowboat across Berlin's Spree Canal brought us into the Western Zone. After a stay in Hesse-Lichtenau, that DP camp in the American Sector of Occupied Germany, the three of us managed to emigrate to Canada. We steamed into Halifax harbour aboard a converted troop ship, the SS Marina Falcon. From there we went by train to Montreal, Quebec, where Aron had found two living relatives, our sponsors - "Auntie" Lina and her son Gershon Goldberg. So, that's where, seven years later, in 1955, I was "naturalized" as a Canadian citizen. I've always liked that word naturalized, as if life before had been somehow unnatural, which, of course, it had been.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td><a href="#top"><img src="images/main/top_button.jpg" border="0"></a></td> <td align="right"><p class="font2"><a href="passages_moses2.asp"><img src="images/main/next_button.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a></p></td> </tr> </table> </td> <td width="12" background="images/content/dots_down.jpg"></td> </tr> </table>
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