By Moses Znaimer (page 2 of 3)

I have two strong recollections from the period before we got to Canada. One relates to food, the other to drink -- not surprising perhaps, given it was wartime. Both, I have no doubt, are actual experiences. I don't just remember them. I can, in fact, still taste them. In the first, I'm lying in my cot, and mother gives me a piece of bread. It's a warm crust that's been rubbed all over with garlic and baked with bits of the garlic pushed inside. Nothing could be simpler. I start to cry because it's so good. Quite an odd thing. Was I hungry? Was I sick? I can't recall.

In the second, some soldiers come by the Camp Mess and offer me a drink. It is cold and dark and sweet and effervescent; and I love it! When I get back to our barracks, I tell my parents about it, but they have no idea what it could be. In the following days and weeks I keep after them to get me that taste again. Was it dark beer? Was it kvass, (A Russian drink made from black bread)? Was it strong and sweet iced tea? None of these! Only when we were finally settled in Montreal, and I tasted my first store-bought Coke did I realize what that treat had been. Even more wondrous was that something so scarce and unknown in that camp, was, in my new world, available in every cooler, in every drugstore and corner store in town, for five, then seven, cents.

It's at this point -- our arrival at that DP Camp in the American Zone of Occupied Germany -- that memory for me starts to accumulate into something certain. This is where I begin to have my own stories; and one of the most vivid has to do with some munitions that a couple of playmates and I found in a stream near the camp.

Towards the end of the war, piles of ammo, big machine gun bullets and larger shells had been dumped in that stream. A retreating Army, I imagine. We amuse ourselves by fishing them out and trying to set them off. An adult comes upon us just as I raise a howitzer-type cartridge in my hand, poised to smash its base on a rock. He lets out a wild holler and starts to run toward me, gesticulating wildly. I drop it and take off. He follows. He chases me into a nearby abandoned building. In retrospect, I'm sure he was only concerned for our well-being, but at the time his determination frightened me. I get away by jumping out of the second floor of that bombed out building. It's quite a leap, and I wake up the next day with a serious hernia as a result.

This is bad news. Our longed-for immigration to Canada depends on passing our medicals. So, prior to my physical, I am literally tied down to keep me from jumping about, and on-board ship and later on shore, the hernia is suppressed with a truss. My condition was never discovered by the authorities, but even years later, mom still half-expected Immigration to come through the door and say, "hey, wait a minuteÉ"

Of that two week Passage to Canada on that converted troop ship, I remember a stormy Atlantic, my parents down below, deathly seasick, and me on my own, hanging out with the sailors, including the very first Black man I'd ever seen in my life. I remember the vast sheds where we new arrivals are slowly processed; then another long train trip; and, finally, Montreal.

Immediately, I am sent to a hospital for my hernia. Suddenly, cut off from the Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, Latvian, Hebrew and God knows what else was flying around my milieu, I come out, two weeks later, with a functional command of English and quite a few colourful words of French.

Aron's first job in Canada was as a presser, and Chaja began work in a bakery. We settled into a 3rd floor walk-up on St. Urbain Street; Libby and Sam, my sister and brother were born; Chaja continued to work. Aron was reunited with his sister Becky who had managed to escape to Northern Rhodesia. Of that generation, she was the only surviving sibling on both sides.