Holocaust survivors meet after 62 years
Published: September 7, 2006
When they were 11 years old, childhood friends Esther Grauer and Tova Weiszner survived a six-month death march.
They then spent three years together during the Second World War in a prison in the occupied Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, begging food from villagers to survive.
They lost touch after the war but trod similar paths, settling in Canada and raising families.
About 20 years ago, a support organization for Holocaust survivors put them in touch, but they hadn’t seen each other in person since not long after they left prison.
Sixty-two years, five children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren later, the survivors were reunited yesterday at Trudeau airport.
“Do you have a Valium? I can’t believe I forgot my Valium,” Grauer, 77, exclaimed moments before the reunion, to no avail.
“I don’t want to make a scene.”
But there was no scene. Only glistening eyes, throats choked with emotion and the silent embrace of friends who have experienced too much and haven’t seen each other since 1944.
“I have no words,” said Weiszner, 76. “There are no words. I am speechless.”
Friends since Grade 2 at their Hebrew elementary school in Lipcani, Romania (now a part of Moldova), Grauer and Weiszner and their families were among more than 1,000 Jews forced from their homes in 1941 by Germany’s Nazis and the Romanian army, marching for six months until they reached the prison barracks in the occupied Ukraine in which they would live for three years. Those who couldn’t walk any longer or disobeyed were shot.
Grauer arrived with her mother and younger sister, Weiszner with her father, pregnant mother and brother.
“It wasn’t a four-star hotel,” Weiszner said. “We slept on the cement floor; there were no beds or even mattresses. And there was no food.”
They would sneak under the barbed wire before dawn (”If the soldiers saw us, they would shoot us.”) and beg from villagers who risked their lives to help them.
Grauer remembers melting snow for water in prison. For food, she rinsed potato skins discarded by the German and Romanian guards.
Bodies of the dead were carried out daily. Weiszner’s parents and her newborn sibling would be among them, ultimately succumbing to typhus and malnutrition. Disease and lice were rampant because prisoners were not allowed to bathe.
“Imagine not having a shower for three years,” Weiszner said.
Weiszner’s and Grauer’s parents heard of a new law protecting young prisoners with no parents, and they made the children pose as orphans so they would be sent to orphanages back in Romania. Grauer eventually reunited with her mother and sister; Weiszner never saw her parents again.
The friends last saw each other in Bucharest in 1944. Separately, both travelled to Israel in the late ’40s, married and had children.
Grauer immigrated to Montreal in 1958, and her husband, a professional soccer player, played for Italian and Greek teams and drove a taxi before opening the Village Cycle and Ski sports store in Dollard des Ormeaux. One of their sons, Morrie Grauer, started the MicroBytes computer store, which now has 16 franchises in Quebec. She recently became a great-grandmother.
Weiszner stayed in Israel for
12 years, then immigrated to Winnipeg, where her husband earned 80 cents an hour as a tailor and she made 50 cents at any job she could get - working in a factory, cooking for a daycare, washing floors.
They raised three children - two of them became dentists, and the other works at a university. Weiszner has been a volunteer for the last 25 years, and still donates her time to three different organizations.
And she recently became a great-grandmother.
“I’ve been lucky,” said the diminutive Weiszner, who has a comedian’s delivery and credits her vitality to “keeping busy -
I don’t just sit on the couch.”
“I’ve had a good life, I have good children - they’re healthy, they’re not in prison.”
Her one regret, however, is that she and Grauer took so long to see each other. Yes, Winnipeg is far, but it’s not like they had to walk, Weiszner said.
Grauer feels the same way.
Friends fortunate enough to have survived the Holocaust and who live in the same country have an obligation to see each other, Grauer noted.
“We were happy to survive, but you never forget. … When you’re that young, it leaves an imprint forever.”
Topping the agenda yesterday after Weiszner’s flight from Winnipeg were lunch and rest.
“And then we’ll probably stay up till midnight and talk,” Weiszner said.
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