Tag: Holocaust

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The Montreal Holocaust Museum’s lifetime preservation of survivor Marguerite Élias Quddus’ story

The importance of taking part in the future of Holocaust education

Attendees gathered at the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) to test out the latest Dimensions in Testimony (DIT) exhibit, which allows one to have an almost real-life first-person interaction with a Holocaust survivor via pre-recorded video responses. 

The test exhibit, based on survivor Marguerite Élias Quddus, features a francophone interactive biography that enables conversation through a 2D interactive display. 

On Feb. 12, the museum held three free, one-hour sessions which took place from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Camille Charbonneau, the museum mediator of the session, shared the initiative’s hopes in gathering over 8,000 interactions with Quddus over the next six months, to ensure the project’s accuracy. 

“It’s very important to give a voice to the people that we still have with us today,” she said.

The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, an institute for visual history and education, developed the DIT project in 2010, gathering over 55,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. 

They partnered with the MHM and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to bring their very first French-speaking survivor testimony to life and to preserve Quddus’ story of resilience.

Quddus was born in December 1936 in Paris, France. After Germany’s occupation of France in 1940, the four-year-old and her family found themselves affected by the antisemitic ruling of the Nazis and the Vichy Regime.

In 1942, her father was murdered in Auschwitz. Quddus and her sister were separated from their mother, where they spent three years hiding in convents and farms, under false identities.

The two sisters reunited with their mother after Liberation. Quddus has resided in Canada since 1967 and has devoted the last decade to speaking with thousands of students to help bring Holocaust education to future generations.

In 2013, she published and illustrated her novel, In Hiding, which is her memoir of the Holocaust. 

MHM executives took part in a five-day real-life question period with Quddus. The team recorded over thousands of interactions with the survivor. Quddus’ pre-recorded responses are in the present beta testing display. 

Charbonneau felt touched after hearing some of Quddus’ earliest childhood memories. 

“She was a child,” said Charbonneau. “She was five years old, and she had to stay in those convents with nuns… She needed to change her complete identity and religion to fit into this mold, to be considered a non-Jewish kid. She had to hide herself. That can be very traumatic for a child.” 

Claire Berger is a volunteer tour guide at the MHM and a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Her father, Emil Berger, was born in Chernivtsi, Romania, and lived in a Ghetto. 

“He remembers living in the ghetto, of course, and being hidden on a farm for six months, which saved him from being deported,” she said.

Berger enjoyed the humane, relatable aspect of conversing with Quddus.

“I love these spunky sort of retorts. I think it humanizes the fact that, you know… that they were children, just as we are,” said Berger.

As a former educator, Berger strongly believes in educating today’s younger generations about the Holocaust, especially in ways that make the most of technology.

Berger plans to take part in the future of Quddus’ interactive display, in the hopes of sharing more survivor stories, like her father’s. 

“My dad passed away 18 years ago and every week now we’re seeing in the paper all of our survivors who are aging… I feel like doing my bit to keep the memory going as much as I can,”

Berger Said.

The MHM’s beta testing of DIT is free and takes place at the museum, on the first and second Sunday of every month until July 2023. With the assistance of an animator, attendees are welcomed to ask Quddus questions at the session.

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Features

Holocaust Survivor Angela Orosz speaks on intergenerational trauma

From left to right: Andrew Fuchs, Fischel Goloig, Lisa LaFlamme, Angela Orosz. Behind, right: Patrick Bordeaux and Daniel Amar. Photo by Emily Pasquarelli // The Concordian

“I dreamt of the Germans,” says Orosz’s daughter who was conditioned to learn adulthood before she even knew the meaning of the word

When she was just three years old, Katy Orosz was sent grocery shopping on her own. Unbeknownst to her, her mother Angela was secretly following along to ensure her safety. Still, the trauma of that early push for independence lingers in Katy today.

In late January, Angela Orosz, one of the youngest Holocaust survivors, spoke at the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) to discuss her daughter’s experiences with intergenerational trauma.

The event, which held an audience of 350 people, took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. 

Former Chief Anchor and Senior Editor of CTV News, Lisa Laflamme, hosted the public interview with Orosz to discuss how the genocide impacted aspects of her life, notably her motherhood.

Laflamme covered Orosz’s story on CTV News in 2020, when the two visited Auschwitz. It had been the survivor’s first time back at the concentration camp since her birth.

Orosz was born on Dec. 21, 1944, in German-occupied Poland at the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was one of few to survive the liberation that following year.

The public discussion unraveled the painful psychological impacts of the Holocaust, and Orosz explained its influence on her early parental experiences.

During the mid to late 1960s, Orosz gave birth to her daughter Katy in Budapest, Hungary. Orosz passed down many of the “survivor skills” that she learned from her mother Vera Otvos-Beins. This consisted of sending her young daughter off to go grocery shopping and take public transportation “alone.”

“She was three years old. She can’t forgive me. I taught her how to go shopping by herself. She didn’t know I was following her, but I wanted her to have that feeling that whatever is happening, she is not lost,” confessed Orosz. 

This motherly instinct to push for early independence and adulthood in her toddler reflected the trauma she endured when anticipating a recurrence of the Holocaust. 

“I think it’s understandable, given what you’ve been through, what your mother probably taught you as a little girl,” said Laflamme. The journalist sympathized with Orosz on the challenges of teaching one’s own child as a survivor. 

In August of 2016, Orosz was asked to speak about the transmission of psychological trauma from mothers to children at a psychiatric conference in Dresden. However, Orosz’ reaction to the invite involved instant denial to her repressed feelings of trauma. “I’m not going to do it, I don’t have trauma,” she said.  

Orosz went directly to her two children to ask about their thoughts on her attending the event. When she questioned her having trauma, her son had little to say. “But my daughter gave me a list to China and back, on what I did,” she jokingly stated. 

“She said, ‘Mom, are you telling me you don’t have trauma? Your whole life is the Holocaust, everything was the Holocaust. You wanted me to be strong and you made me scared. I couldn’t go to sleep because I dreamt of the Germans,’” explained Orosz. 

Sarah Fogg is a staff member at the MHM and a third-generation survivor to her two grandparents, Marek and Mara Lewkowicz, who survived the Holocaust in Balkhash, Kazakhstan and Kassel, Germany. After World War II, the young couple began a family and fled as refugees to Canada, where they started a new chapter in their lives. 

Fogg has worked with Orosz for years, and emphasized her good intent in trying to protect her daughter from potential harms after the Holocaust. 

The thought of Orosz instilling fear into her daughter at such a young age had never been her intention. “For Angi, it wasn’t from that perspective at all, she was just trying to build a safer human,” expressed Fogg.

Orosz felt strongly towards being open about her past with her children, in hopes of teaching them resilience and gratefulness. 

She referred to memories early on in her parenthood when her children would complain about something. For instance, if they disliked the meal their mother cooked for them, Orosz would reply with “you know how happy [you] would have been in Auschwitz?”.

“We were happy if water came from the faucets in Auschwitz, how could you dare to complain?” she often asked her children.

When her children were young, she juggled the task of being a novice mother while carrying the weight of being a Holocaust survivor. Orosz was also just trying her best, and many other survivors were too.

“When I think of the survivors that I know, again I can’t speak for everybody, everyone’s different, everyone has just tried their best. They came to Canada as refugees, they had to build new lives, learn new languages, new jobs, start from nothing. And I think they all just did the best they could, really,” said Fogg.

Despite never enduring trauma from the Holocaust, Fogg sympathizes with other descendants who’ve felt as though they lived within their families’ tragic stories. 

“Now that I work at the museum, I know that there’s a right way and a wrong way to bring up the history because it could be really traumatizing to talk about it, for the listener and for the survivor,” said Fogg.

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Arts

Public Intimacy—discovering the margin between the public and the private

Exhibition, Courtesy: JewishMuseum

The interactive piece kicks off the reopening of the Museum of Jewish Montreal

There is a line drawn between public and private spheres. In our lives, everyone has a limit as to what is kept personal and what we want to display to the public. As of Oct.13, art enthusiasts have the chance to explore this idea through the creation of Berlin artists Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger titled Public Intimacy, showcased at the Museum of Jewish Montreal until Jan. 22. 

The installation is composed of a plethora of curtains hung from a tall metal framework. Curtains of different materials, densities, and colors, are meant for the public to wander through and reflect upon. It’s a maze, and it provides the chance to close each participant off from the rest of the public, allowing them as much intimacy as they desire. 

“The curtains are second hand, they all come from a regional context that has a history with the Holocaust, the contemporary rise of neo-fascism,” said Stokvis-Hauer. “I don’t think that the exhibition is only about that, either. There are a million different things that public privacy can be associated with, it’s such a broad topic.”

The installation’s walls are occupied by immense photographs of mysterious residential windows, accompanied by existential and thought-provoking questions. 

The curtains were found around the Berlin area in historic places. Some were found in abandoned buildings previously occupied by German Democratic Republic government officials, some belonged to Mundingers’ grandmother, and others were found on the street. 

In 2019, the two artists were called in by the Museum of Jewish Montreal to present a project on-site. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down any works in progress, and the Museum of Jewish Montreal was shut down. 

This is the first exhibition since the museum’s reopening and the first Montreal-based project for the artist tandem. In this new space, the artists found even more room for freedom of discovery.

There certainly is an element of the exhibition that harkens to the past and present and leans towards elements of “Jewishness,” according to the museum’s artistic director Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer.  Themes of racism, xenophobia, and possibly other matters relevant to a broader community than the Jewish. 

“We aren’t Jewish ourselves, but we have history with the culture,” said Mundinger. The artist had been invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galicia Jewish museum located in Kraków in Poland. Hirsch had gone as far as spending three years with a concentration camp survivor to create his biography in the form of a graphic novel. The work is not yet published through an official company.

In terms of an exhibit, the museum’s staff team saw Public Intimacy as a connection of interest to the Jewish community in Montreal. For the team, there’s a wide range of interesting questions that are relevant to the Jewish community, and further relevant to other communities. 

“What’s so great about Johannes and Sophia’s work is that it asks infinite questions,” added Stokvis-Hauer. “It invites everyone to think about where the line is between public and private on the macro and micro scales.” This piece, she emphasized, is meditative.

If you want your brain and heartstrings tugged on, all while experiencing the essence of a homely yet conflicted culture, you should visit the installation in the Mile End before it closes on Jan. 22. You can read more about the event on the Museum’s website.

Categories
Arts

Finding strength in simplicity: reading and redefining dance

Needle and Thread is an ode to those who were lost

Every stitch, every letter spelled out during Needle and Thread retrieves the memories of 600 Holocaust victims. “We’re not going for spectacle,” Mindy Yan Miller said. “But authenticity, experience, feeling…”

Needle and Thread is a collaborative, commemorative performance by Mindy, a professor in the department of fibres and material practices at Concordia, and her sister-in-law, Suzanne Miller. Suzanne is a contemporary choreographer and dancer, whereas Mindy works primarily in installation and sculpture with used clothing, cowhide and human hair.

In this performance, Suzanne uses her body to spell out the names of the 600 Holocaust victims, wearing a long, patchwork skirt, which Mindy is tirelessly adding to. The massive garment is composed of many shirts, dresses, skirts and pairs of pants joined together with a simple blanket stitch. The names of the victims are recorded in the “Pages of Testimony” submitted to Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

Mindy is the ground, my anchor, the base note [of Needle and Thread,] and I am the air,” said Suzanne.

Suzanne trembled, sweat gleaming off her chest, as she embodied the very lives and the stories behind the names she spelled. Her movements are not that of conventional dance, but of a gestural language that can only be understood through witnessing.

She reaches in, towards her chest, falls on the ground, covers her eyes with one, then two hands. She looks back, then up, she twists, clasps her hands, touching her elbow to her side.

Mindy stitches, never looking up, she is static. Only moving to reach into her tool pouch to thread a needle.

The names are spelled on a blackboard, as a man whispers them to the writer. She writes quickly, the name is spelled out, on the board, and by Suzanne. The writer erases, and moves on to the next. This takes 10 seconds.

“It’s not about provoking,” Suzanne said. Needle and Thread is jarring. The power of their actions resonate with the audience.

The sister-in-laws were invited to perform this piece in the Musée d’Art Contemporain as part of Off Parcours Danse, a dance conference that took place from Nov. 25-29 at Place des Arts. Needle and Thread was developed last year at “Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World,” part of a series of Jewish arts conferences held at Arizona State University, and has since been performed close to Jewish sites across North America and Europe. Each time, something changes, is lost or added, effectively creating a different experience for viewers. The skirt grows, bit by bit.

 

Photo by Britanny Clarke.

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