Canada's Holocaust survivors are dying. Who will carry their stories forward?

About 40,000 Holocaust survivors settled in Canada after the war, and many later spent their retirement years teaching future generations about hatred and antisemitism. They helped found major Holocaust museums and school speaker programs, and pushed for mandatory Holocaust education in public schools. They were also instrumental in launching the annual Holocaust Education Week, now underway across Canada to coincide with the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, on Nov. 9, 1938.

In the last few months, at least a dozen of Canada’s most prominent and beloved remaining Holocaust speakers and authors have died. They include Toronto’s Judy Weissenberg Cohen, 97, who created a website to document women’s experiences of the Holocaust; fellow Torontonian Rose Lipszyc, 97, an Order of Canada recipient whose story was published this February as the graphic novel Two Roses; Harry Rozendaal, 95, who died in Poland in May during his first March of the Living, undertaken so he could say Kaddish there for his murdered mother; Montrealer Ted Bolgar, 101, an orphan who advocated for fellow survivors; and Calgary’s Morris Dancyger, 86, who watched his father be shot and killed—a full year after liberation—by a former Auschwitz guard whom he had recognized at their displaced persons camp.

The list continues with several Montreal survivors who have recently died, including Maxwell Smart, the subject of the 2023 feature film The Boy in the Woods; Sidney Zoltak; Paula Bultz; and David Barzilay. Also among those who recently died was Eva Olsson, from Bracebridge, Ont.

On today’s special “Honourable Menschen” episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast, host Ellin Bessner is joined by The CJN’s obituary columnist, Heather Ringel, and Dara Solomon, executive director of the Toronto Holocaust Museum. They share memories of these survivors and discuss what motivated many of them to begin speaking publicly only many years after arriving in Canada. They also explore how Holocaust education is changing as the generation of first-person eyewitnesses disappears.

Related links

• Special thanks for permission to use video and audio of the survivors: March of the Living, Calgary Jewish Federation, Hon. Stephen Lecce, the Montreal Holocaust Museum, and