Life Writing: The Curated Collection

In the Hour of Fate and Danger

Ferenc Andai

“Portents of death are trembling in the air.”

In the lush mountains of Serbia in 1944, nineteen-year-old Ferenc is one of thousands of Hungarian Jewish men forced to work to exhaustion, subject to the whims of cruel Hungarian commanders and German overseers. For Ferenc, the only relief from his harsh reality is his company — an artistic and literary circle of men that includes the renowned poet Miklós Radnóti. As liberation inches closer and a fierce battle for power between Nazi collaborators and resisters rages on in the region, Ferenc faces decisions that will determine whether he lives or dies. 

Translated from the award-winning Hungarian memoir published in 2003.

Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum

Molly Applebaum

“When I looked at the world with the eyes of a child it appeared so rose-coloured...and now? I am happy when I survive another day and I await the next in fear.” 

Twelve-year-old Molly and her cousin Helen find refuge on a farm in Poland, where their only hope for survival is to be hidden away underground — in a box. Confined “in a grave” from 1943 to early 1945, Molly writes of the cold, dark space; the ever-present dirt and bugs; the unbearable suffering from insufficient food; and the difficult, complicated reliance on two Polish farmers who are risking their own lives to save her. Unique and poignant, Molly’s diary is a stark confession of her fears and anxieties, her despair and her secrets and, above all, her fervent wish to stay alive. 

Includes a postwar memoir, written fifty years later, which offers a fascinating comparative reflection on wartime and postwar life.

A Promise of Sweet Tea

Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt

“We were close enough to these soldiers to see their faces. In them we saw the end of our lives. But, somehow, we still did not give up hope and surrender.”

A Jewish community in prewar Eastern Europe comes alive in this vividly told story of a childhood interrupted by the Holocaust. In his wry and evocative prose, Pinchas Blitt conjures Kortelisy — a humble, vibrant village in the backwoods of western Ukraine. Under the Soviets, Pinchas innocently devotes himself to Comrade Stalin; under the Nazis, he witnesses his beloved village being brutally attacked. As his family seeks safety in the marshes and forests, their precarious existence brings Pinchas face to face with his own mortality and faith, and with a sense of dislocation that will accompany him throughout his life.

A powerful, poignant memoir of a vanished time and place by one of the only survivors of a community that was destroyed in the Holocaust.

Passport to Reprieve

Sonia Caplan

“Trembling with agitation and anxiety, I finally realized that there were just three possibilities for us: one was to get permission from the Gestapo, by some miracle, to be exempt again; the other to be shot; and the third to be deported.”

Sonia, seventeen years old, is stranded in Tarnów, Poland, with her mother and sister when war breaks out, unable to realize her dream of studying journalism in Paris. As her father works feverishly from Canada to get them to safety, he manages to become a citizen of neutral Nicaragua and sends Nicaraguan passports to his family. Armed only with these documents, Sonia faces the Gestapo again and again as anti-Jewish laws escalate and the daily violence intensifies. Torn between temporary triumphs and an agonizing sense of futility, Sonia’s wait for a reprieve turns ominous in the face of deportation.

A compelling, beautifully lyrical memoir that explores an unusual trajectory from a ghetto in Poland to an internment camp in Germany.

In Dreams Together: The Diary of Leslie Fazekas

Leslie Fazekas

“All it takes is a single bomb, dumb and random, to defeat all hope. But it would be a beautiful thing for us to meet again — a triumph of endurance, faith and love.”

Leslie and his girlfriend, Judit, are teenagers in love when they are deported from Hungary together. But when they arrive in Austria, they are separated from one another, each interned as a forced labourer. For eight months, Leslie writes near-daily diary entries addressed to Judit — love letters, as well as postcards, that detail his life in captivity and his yearning to reunite with her, his words alternating between hope and uncertainty. 

Diary entries and postcards, translated from Hungarian, are featured alongside Leslie’s postwar memoir, which reflects on his childhood, the war and the love that shaped his life.

A Childhood Adrift

René Goldman

“The recurring bouts of unrelieved sadness and depression that I suffered years later in my adolescence were caused to no small extent by the silencing of emotions in the painful time when I was a hidden Jewish child.”

René grows up entranced with theatre, music, languages and geography. Raised by loving and protective parents, he feels safe as he wanders the streets and alleys near his home in Luxembourg and then Belgium, carefree and prone to mischief. But when he starts hearing adults talk about “arrests” and “deportation,” René is forced to grapple with the strange, new reality of life under German occupation. In 1942, his family flees to France, and soon eight-year-old René is separated from his parents and shunted between children’s homes and convents, where he must hide both his Jewish identity and his mounting anxiety. 

An eloquent personal narrative detailed with historical research and intuitive observations that explores identity, closure, disillusionment and the anguish of silenced emotions.

As the Lilacs Bloomed

Anna Molnár Hegedűs

“Six months have passed since I arrived home. Six months full of hope, waiting, heart-gripping anxiety and dark despair.”

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupies Hungary, Anna barely has time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossom once again, she returns to her hometown of Szatmár and sets her memories to paper, the experiences still raw and vivid. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna has survived a lifetime of trauma, and as she writes, she waits, desperately hoping her family will return. 

Translated from the Hungarian memoir published in Romania in 1946.

The Vale of Tears

Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung

“My tears, like the words of the prayer, fell like fresh dew: pure, delicate, unadulterated, honest words, and pure, delicate, unadulterated, honest tears.”

Replete with quotes from Jewish scripture and liturgy, Rabbi Hirschprung’s memoir — written in Yiddish in 1944 — details his persecution as a young Orthodox rabbi and his harrowing escape from both German- and Soviet-occupied Poland. Finding inspiration and hope in Jewish scripture and psalms, Hirschprung navigates the darkness to a safe harbour in Kobe, Japan.

First serialized in Der Keneder Adler, a Yiddish daily newspaper that was based in Montreal.

Lament

Moishe Kantorowitz

“They had all disappeared. They had disappeared, and with them, their screams, their cries and their lament. All that was left along the empty train was a frightening and deadly silence.”

As the German army invades his shtetl in Poland, young Moishe decides to mentally record everything he sees. In this movingly descriptive and devastating portrayal of prewar Jewish life and its destruction during the Holocaust, Moishe bears witness to incomprehensible cruelties and to the lives and communities that are rapidly wiped out by the Nazis. Moishe’s entire family is murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Moishe, selected to live, endures brutal treatment and constant hunger, his survival dependent on the whims of his overseers and small acts of generosity that bring him back from the brink of death.

In vivid detail, readers are transported from Moishe’s shtetl to the horrors of Auschwitz to the rugged expanses of Newfoundland, offering a deeply moving account of the devastation of the Holocaust and its ongoing impact.

Between the Lines: The Diary of Margit Kassai

Margit Kassai

“You see, Pipus, I’m just saying — this followed me around throughout the whole game, this mad and incomprehensible series of lucky coincidences. This is how bombs, missiles, Arrow Cross raids, police raids, etc., always hit the ground five minutes before me or eight minutes after me, two metres to the right of me or five metres behind me….”

In March 1945 in Budapest, Margit begins writing what she refers to as a “posthumous diary,” addressed to her husband who was taken away for forced labour the previous year. With wry self-deprecation, dark humour and an incredible attention to detail, Margit describes the persecution of Jews and how she feels working in children’s homes and living under a false identity. Even as bombs fall around her during the siege of Budapest, she braves the streets to find food for the children in her care, writing unflinchingly of the suffering she endures and her determination to see her husband again.

This remarkable diary-memoir was translated from the Hungarian book published in 2020.

Traces of What Was

Steve Rotschild

“It was at the end of March 1944, on a cool, bright and sunny day, the beginning of spring, the time of renewal of life, that the SS came to take the children.”

In the Vilna ghetto, ten-year-old Steve learns to hide, to be silent, to be still — and to wait. He knows the sound of the Nazis’ army boots and knows to hold his breath until their footsteps recede. When rumours spread of the ghetto’s impending liquidation, Steve’s mother, determined and tenacious, smuggles them out, ending up in a forced labour camp run by a sympathetic German officer. 

A captivating journey through a wartime childhood in Vilna, Rotschild artfully juxtaposes his past, furtive walks outside the ghetto with his long, liberating walks through Toronto fifty years after the war.

If Only It Were Fiction

Elsa Thon

“Only a miracle could save me now. What God would accept my prayers? I was a fraud. I carried forged documents. I lied all the time. I wasn’t who I said I was. But I wanted to live.”

Strong-willed and ambitious, sixteen-year-old Elsa is working as a photographer’s apprentice when the Germans occupy her town of Pruszków, Poland, in 1939. Every ounce of her will and ingenuity is called into play as she moves from ghetto to ghetto, throws in her lot with a Zionist youth group and is recruited by the Jewish underground. Despite her deep belief that destiny is determining her fate, Elsa faces every fraught situation with self-possession and maturity.

A vivid and beautifully written coming-of-age story enriched by Thon’s family tradition of storytelling and her unerring eye for detail.

Diaries paired with memoirs

• Too Many Goodbyes: The Diaries of Susan Garfield by Susan Garfield
• Each Day Could Be Our Last: Irena’s Wartime Diary by Irena Peritz from Before All Memory Is Lost: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust

Vignette-style writing

• Where Courage Lives by Muguette Myers
• Bits and Pieces by Henia Reinhartz
• Dignity Endures by Judith Rubinstein
• Album of My Life by Ann Szedlecki

Memoirs with art and imagery

• A Mother to My Mother by Malka Pischanitskaya
• In Hiding by Marguerite Élias Quddus

Dual narratives

• Stronger Together by Ibolya Grossman and Andy Réti (mother/son)
• Joy Runs Deeper by Bronia Beker and Joseph Beker (wife/husband)
• Daring to Hope by Chana Broder and Rachel Lisogurski (mother/daughter)
• Memories from the Abyss/But I Had A Happy Childhood by William Tannenzapf and Renate Krakauer (father/daughter)
• Never Far Apart by Kitty Salsberg and Ellen Foster (sisters)
• The Violin/A Child’s Testimony by Rachel Shtibel and Adam Shtibel (wife/husband)