Jewish orphans mark 60th anniversary of their arrival in Canada

They are the orphans of the Holocaust, the fortunate few who survived the Nazis' plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

In 1947, the Canadian Jewish Congress finally persuaded a reluctant Canadian government to accept 1,123 Jewish children who had spent the war years either in hiding or in forced labour camps, ghettos and concentration camps.

Yesterday morning, in the party room of a Côte St. Luc apartment building, about 50 so-called orphan survivors, almost all of whom originally came from Hungary, gathered to revive old friendships and celebrate the 60th anniversary of their arrival in Canada in 1948.

"The only memories we share are happy memories," organizer Tommy Strasser, 78, said.

A few at yesterday's reunion have been friends since childhood. Others met during the hardships of the camps or on the ship to Canada or in Montreal.

They get together to celebrate lives that have been shaped by extraordinary strength, determination and, of course, luck.

"We are not heroes," Strasser said. "We are not smarter. We are just lucky."

Lucky to have survived unspeakable hardships and, as many said over a breakfast of bagels and smoked salmon, lucky to have immigrated to Canada.

"I'm very proud (to be a Canadian) and very happy to have come here," said Myer Gottesman, 77, who is from a small Hungarian town called Szeged.

He sat at a table with his wife, Claire, another orphan, who came from Budapest, and his old Szeged school friend Jeff Weiss, who also immigrated as a orphan in 1948.

Myer and Claire, who knew each other in Hungary and met again in Montreal, have two children - one a doctor, the other a lawyer - and five grandchildren.

Weiss has two sons, one a computer expert and the other a teacher at a culinary school.

"I can't think of any other country where we could have achieved with the education of our children, which was mostly free education, what this country offers," Myer Gottesman said.

Canada, unfortunately, also has a history of anti-Semitism, which led to the turning away of boatloads of Jewish refugees before the Second World War and the refusal to accept Jewish orphans during the war.

Most of these people are believed to have been killed in the death camps.

But for Myer and Claire, that is all in the past.

"I don't feel good about it, but thank God the attitude has changed. The people who are responsible for that are gone," Myer said, adding that people will always be suspicious about immigrants. "It's human nature to be like that."

Strasser and his friends first organized the gathering 10 years ago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the orphans' arrival in Canada. They meet every five years.

They come to talk about family and old friends and get reacquainted in an effort to keep the bonds of a shared history strong.

"What holds us together is the Hungarian language, although we don't speak it much any more," Strasser said. "A lot of us married Canadian spouses."

Strasser was an only child who came from a small town in what is now the Slovak Republic, where his father worked as an accountant for the local office of the Philips electric company.

Most of the town's 4,000 Jews were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz, near Cracow, in southern Poland. Only about 100 survived the war. Strasser said he believes his parents died at the camp but he has never found a record of their deaths, so he can't be certain.

As a teenager, he worked in a forced labour camp near Budapest, building tank traps until 1944, when the Nazis tried to ship him to Auschwitz.

"They were going to deport us, but Raoul Wallenberg (the Swedish diplomat responsible for saving many Hungarian Jews) intervened and that's why I'm alive. He arranged for us to be sent back to the Jewish ghetto in Budapest," Strasser said.

Like many of the orphans, Strasser returned to his home town only to discover there was nothing left for him. His father and mother, uncles and aunts were all dead. With thousands of eastern Europeans fleeing the Soviet forces, he joined their ranks and went to Paris.

When he discovered through the Canadian Jewish Congress that he could emigrate to Canada as an orphan, he signed up. The cutoff age was 18.

"I was 171/2, so I just made the cut," he said with a chuckle.

The orphans came over in three ships out of Southampton, England, in late 1947 and 1948.

They landed in Halifax. About 800 settled in Montreal and Toronto. Of the remainder, approximately 120 settled in Manitoba, a dozen in Saskatchewan, 30 in Alberta and 40 in British Columbia.

The Canadian Jewish Congress organized foster homes and education and helped them land jobs.

Finding homes was not easy, because most families wanted to take in young girls. Only 37 of the children were under age 10, and about 70 per cent were teenage boys whose experiences had transformed them into men.

The future Claire Gottesman was one of the few women. She and Myer met again in Montreal and in 1951 the two married.

Myer Gottesman started a clothing business that he still runs.

Jeff Weiss, his boyhood friend, began one of Montreal's first audio businesses before Eaton's department store hired him to start its audio department.

Strasser, who had trained as a ladies' handbag maker in Hungary, became a bookkeeper and later an office manager.

Like the other orphans, he has planted deep family roots in Canada, with three children and six grandchildren - which is how, as one orphan said, "We defeated Hitler."

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008