We are here to pay our respects and remember my mother, Celina. Each of us is different and how we interact with each other is also different. We each have our own memories and perspectives, as you’ll hear.
My mother was angry at the world because of her experiences. She was kind, considerate, “a gita nishuma”, literally, a good soul, a wonderful wife, and devoted to family and friends. She deserved a better life.
My mother was born on June 1, 1923 in a very small village, named Jasiorowka, just east of Warsaw, and into a world that no longer exists. A substantial proportion of the village population was Jewish, most of whom were related in one way or another. My mother did not talk much about her childhood or life in pre-war Poland. Her father Leib was a butcher – I am named after him. Her mother Chaya was a homemaker. She was the oldest child and had a brother, Zischa and a sister, Yuspa. Her grandmother also lived with the family. My mother was a fussy eater, and skinny so her parents indulged her. She attended Polish public school and completed the equivalent of elementary school or middle school. One thing I learned from her is to never confuse intelligence with education.
My mother’s family was not poor but it is still difficult for us to comprehend the gap between our level of material well-being and pre-war rural Poland. She grew up in a very small house – just two rooms for six people, and no indoor bathroom. My kids shared bedrooms. My mother told me that they should each have their own room. But, when my kids complained about sharing, my mother would indignantly remind them that she shared not a room, but a bed with her grandmother.
Mummy considered the world a dangerous place. Powerful, malevolent forces were conspiring to harm her and her loved ones. Based on her life experiences she was not wrong. I used to tease her that since life was so dangerous I should never get out of bed.
When I was growing up I felt an underlying tension – bad things could happen at any time. One could come home from school or work and discover something bad had happened. And sometimes it did.
In September 1939, when my mother was 16, the Second World War began. My mother was traumatized by the war. She was the only member of her immediate family alive by 1944 and most of her extended family were murdered. My mother was hidden by Poles and was extraordinarily fortunate to stay out of the camps and ghettos. But there was constant danger of capture and betrayal and a number of harrowing incidents when her life hung in the balance.
In the fall of 1942, the roundup of Jews was underway. My mother and some cousins, including Mottel Cyranko, were given some money by a wealthier relative, and headed for Warsaw where they had addresses of some people prepared to hide them. At some point during the war, my mother had to ford the Bug River at night. This is a major river in Poland, and my mother did not know how to swim. She almost drowned and remained terrified of water her entire life and had a great fear of lakes and swimming pools. Around this time, my mother started going by the name Celina instead of Sara as she was known in the family. This was to help establish her persona as a Catholic Pole.
My mother could pass as a Pole. She spoke good Polish, that is without a Jewish accent, and she did not “look Jewish”. Although my mother was profoundly Jewish – it was an essential and ineradicable part of her identity – she was a little uncomfortable with it. She was not religious, never attended synagogue, except for bar mitzvahs or weddings, and was not comfortable in shul.
When I was a child I had very blond hair and blue eyes. My mother was delighted. When I told her that the parents of a friend had commented that they’d never met a Jew who looked like me she was very pleased despite the prejudice implicit in the comment. When my son Juda was a baby I remember my mother looking wistfully at him and sadly saying he looks so Jewish.
My mother preferred to speak Polish. My father Yiddish. Part of this is a legacy from the war when to be overheard speaking Yiddish could be a death sentence.
Despite Mummy’s ambivalence she mastered a famous characteristic of the Jewish mother – the guilt trip. One example: She asked one of my sons, when he was an adult, how things were going. He replied that he was very tired. Without any hesitation she responded “Too tired to lift a finger to dial a telephone I suppose.”
Returning to my mother’s story, in Warsaw she stayed with a family of modest means: a father, a mother and two sons her age. The neighbours were told she was a cousin of theirs from the countryside. The whole family slept in one cramped room. One of her cousins who knew where she was staying was arrested. The lives of all the members of the family hiding her were now in grave danger. They told her to leave.
Imagine – walking down a street with no place to go, only the clothes on your back, knowing that the authorities want you dead. My mother described walking in a daze, praying to be shot in the back. The day was June 1, 1943, my mother’s 20th birthday.
The janitor of the building in which she was hiding saw her in the street and took her in. The courrier who made the regular payments for her upkeep took her to a farm in the countryside when he found her at the janitor’s. At the farm, she joined 9 relatives including two small children. They all slept in a crawl space under the house. My mother said that the space was so tight that when one person turned they all had to turn. The area in which the farm was located was liberated by the Red Army in the summer of 1944.
How did my mother meet my father, Oscar? My father was married before the war and had two young children. All murdered in Treblinka. My father and his brother Zygmunt were interned in Treblinka but participated in and escaped during the prisoner uprising in August 1943. Eventually my father joined a group of local Jews hiding in the woods. Among them was Mottel Cyranko, then a 13-year old boy who would later introduce Oscar to his cousin Celina.
After the liberation, in the summer of 1944, my mother, Mottel and a few of their surviving family members emerged from the forests and from hiding to return to their village, Jasiorowka. In January 1945, a few nights after the Red Army advanced from the village to launch the final offensive that ended the war, my mother, Mottel, and their remaining family members were attacked by members of the Polish resistance. Three family members were killed. The survivors fled the village for Lodz which had not been badly damaged during the war and where Mottel knew my father was staying and would help them.
My father and Uncle Zygmunt had an apartment in Lodz that is legendary in our family. It is where my parents became a couple, my cousin Krysia was born, and our cousin Fella and Wlodek Szer met and were married. Wlodek eloquently describes life is this apartment in his recently published memoirs. I quote: “It lasted only a year and a half, but life there had such intensity that it left a mark on all of us.”
When my parents met my mother was 22 years old. My father was 17 years older. My mother told me that a couple from her village noticed my father’s increasing interest in this
attractive young woman. They believed he was too old for her and tried to dissuade him by telling him that my mother had venereal disease or some other sexually transmitted disease. Happily my father ignored them.
My parents never formally married. I would occasionally tease my mother about this. She would (indignantly) respond that it was a different and special time, which it was.
My parents had a wonderful marriage. My father adored my mother. As a child I thought it an ideal marriage, and I still do. A model to aspire to… Loving, respectful, full of tenderness. I do not remember my parents ever bickering.
One might expect that since my father was much older and more experienced, that he would be the dominant partner. Not so. In August 1946, after the assassination of a close friend in Lodz and recurrent antisemitism, my mother, who was nine months pregnant at the time, told my father that she would not have her child in Poland. My father was running a successful tinsmith business at the time. He was not keen to leave. However my mother insisted, and they were smuggled into Germany in the back of a van and became displaced persons. I was born three weeks later.
We spent about a year and a half in Germany and finally emigrated to Canada, arriving at Pier 21 in Halifax on April 30, 1948. We settled in Montreal, because my mother had an uncle, Louis Zuker, living here. He was a pillar of the Montreal Jewish community. Uncle Zuker was very supportive and my parents and family showed him deference and respect.
My sister, Malka, was born shortly after our arrival in Montreal. My brother Charlie was born some years later. We were joined in Canada by my father’s brother Zygmunt and his family, as well as my father’s sister Nacha and her family. We lived together, first in a single cold water flat, and then, as the family’s economic conditions improved, in a triplex – Zygmunt and his family on the ground floor, Nacha and her family on the middle floor, and our family on the top floor.
There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child. It wasn’t quite a village, but the seven of us kids were all raised by six adults. I feel that we were enormously privileged to grow up in this environment. Despite the challenges of being new immigrants, mastering a new language and adapting to a new country, these were the happiest years of my mother’s life.
My parents developed a wide circle of friends, mostly recent Jewish emigrees from Eastern Europe like themselves. My mother was really in her element, surrounded by loving family. She loved children and was the primary caregiver to all of us. As you will hear, all of us have heartfelt memories of this period and of my mother.
When the kids were older, there was an opportunity for my mother to take a job as a file clerk in medical records at the Jewish General Hospital. My father was not happy. He had very clear and conventional ideas about the responsibilities of a husband and wife in a marriage. The husband’s duty was to provide for his family and the wife’s duty was to run the household. My mother prevailed, but she worked very hard to ensure that the household was maintained to her own high standards.
In 1966 my father died after a short illness. The next year was extraordinarily difficult for my mother and the rest of the family. As it turns out, it was extremely important that my mother had a job at the hospital, where she ultimately worked for more than 25 years. She was also forced to take on a second job, which my uncle Zygmunt arranged at the butcher shop he managed. My uncle and my father had made some investments which, several years later, would generate income to help ensure my mother’s financial well-being.
My mother was a widow for almost fifty years. Three years after my father died, my mother remarried. As far as I know, my mother was never told that her new husband had previously had cancer. The cancer returned with a vengeance on their honeymoon in Mexico. The honeymoon was cut short. Doctors were consulted and they went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he died. They had been married for less than a year. In Minnesota my mother was treated as a pariah, with disdain …, considered a gold-digger who had married for money. My mother was devastated. She never again contemplated remarriage. This was a tragedy for my mother. She would have made someone extremely happy. She would have made a wonderful wife.
We like to think that we were good kids. I think we were good kids. The family and friends did their best to support and assist my mother in every way. My mother was an enthusiastic traveller and a terrific walker. We all took her on vacations. When my wife and I took a sabbatical after I finished school in 1974, my mother and Uncle Julek spent a month with us tromping around Switzerland and Paris. My sister and my uncles and aunts took her south or to Europe in the winter. She enjoyed these trips enormously. When my mother was 81, I took her on a long road trip. We drove to Victoria to visit my cousin Krysia and my Auntie Maryla, and my mother loved it. I had her hiking in the Rockies!
But it was not enough. My mother was lonely. Her passion was family, and she exulted in her grandchildren, as you’ll hear more about.
In the last few years of her life, as her health declined, my mother was blessed to have a group of exceptional caregivers. Dolly, Tina and Myrtle made her life as stimulating and fulfilling as possible. They were conscientious and showed incredible patience, tenderness and respect – thank you.
My mother was a wonderful person. She was warm and kind hearted. Everyone who knew her saw these qualities. Her life was centred on her family and she always put family first. We will all miss her.