By Eleanor Kazdan, November 12, 2020 — When I start feeling sorry for myself about the sudden and gradual changes in my life due to the pandemic, I think of others who have had to endure much worse.
My maternal grandparents, Anna and Moses Stolow fled from Russia in the 1920s because of violent Anti-Semitism. Before that, my grandfather was a draft dodger. He forged papers to avoid fighting for the Czar’s army in the 1900s. My mother was a young child and almost died of pneumonia because of the arduous voyage to North America. They along with many other Jews were displaced in strange cities where they didn’t speak the language and had little choice but to work long hours in unskilled jobs to eke out an existence.
My mother and her four younger brothers grew up in the bitter cold of Montreal winters without hot water. When my grandmother became ill with tuberculosis my mother and her brothers were sent to an orphanage for at least a year as my grandfather was unable to care for the family. There my mother experienced both cruelty and kindness. Luckily, the family left Eastern Europe before the worst horrors of the Holocaust.
My father’s parents, Frank and Annie, also fled from Russia in the early 1900s. They first moved to New York City when my father was born. After moving to Toronto a few years later, my grandfather died suddenly after gall bladder surgery. My grandmother was left to support three young children. She scraped by as a seamstress. When my father was four years old he began selling newspapers in the streets of Toronto and by the age of 6 had other children working for him. He suffered dental pain for years after injuring his front teeth; the family couldn’t afford to go to a dentist. One of his newspaper customers offered to pay for the needed work which ended up being the extraction of teeth.
George, the father of my childhood friend Kathy lost his wife and young child to the Nazis in Hungary in the 1940s. He remarried. Soon after Kathy was born, his wife died of breast cancer. He remarried a 3rd time bringing his family to Canada in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution. Kathy remembered their escape when she was 6 or 7 and how her staying quiet was a matter of life or death. In Toronto, George and his wife Klara learned English, worked hard, and built a comfortable life for their family.
The family of another childhood friend, Elaine, had a similar story. Elaine’s father Sam lost his wife and young child in the Holocaust. He married Elaine’s mother Sara who had avoided the gas chambers in Poland by pretending to be a Christian girl. They moved to Toronto in the late 1940s. Sam and Sara opened a clothing store and worked hard to give Elaine and her sister a wonderful life.
Now it is our turn to endure hardship of another sort. We are part of history and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be telling our stories one day.