Gabrielle Selina Reingewirtz Samra Montreal, 2007

It was a cool but sunny spring morning in April 2007 when twelve-year-old Gabby Samra faced an audience of four hundred friends, family members, and congregants who had gathered at her synagogue in Montreal to help celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. Not only was this the culmination of more than a year of work, learning and studying the Hebrew prayers and blessings she was about to recite, but Gabby had also spent the previous few months researching information about a young Jewish girl who had never had the opportunity to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. This girl, like so many other Jewish children, had been killed during the war in Auschwitz, one of the worst of Adolf Hitler’s death camps. Her name was Chaya Leah Dragun.

It was actually Gabby’s mother who had the idea to have Gabby ‘twin’ with a child of the Holocaust. Gabby’s older brother Mikey had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah a couple of years earlier, and he had also been part of a twinning program. When it came time for Gabby to begin to study for her Bat Mitzvah, it seemed natural that she too would find a way to honour and remember a Jewish child from the war.

Gabby’s mother searched on a Holocaust database for a family who had come from the same town in Poland as her own father. She found the Dragun family and learnt that Abraham Dragun had survived the war and now lived in Israel. Abraham became the important link to providing information about his family. Mikey, in his Bar Mitzvah, had honoured Abraham’s younger brother, Yitzhak Yaakov Dragun. Abraham’s sister, Chaya Leah, became Gabby’s twin for her Bat Mitzvah.

Gabby is slender and pale, with intense blue eyes and sandy blonde hair. She is smart – attending a school for gifted students – and articulate. Though softly spoken, she is strong-spirited. Gabby never goes far without a book in her hands. But she is equally passionate about sports like soccer and basketball. Like Gabby, Chaya Leah Dragun was quiet, had long fair hair and blue eyes. She also loved to read and loved her friends and family. She was just about Gabby’s age when the war broke out in 1939.

Chaya Leah was from Zuromin, a town located just ninety-six kilometres from the city of Warsaw in Poland. When the war began, the Nazis occupied Zuromin, and Chaya Leah and her family were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. They lived there for three years, facing starvation, disease and the constant fear of what would happen to them. In 1942, Chaya Leah and her family were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was immediately sent to the gas chambers.

The Dragun Family Chaya Leah is on the far left with her arm around her younger brother, Yitzhak Yaakov.

Before her Bat Mitzvah, Gabby already knew a fair amount about the Holocaust, having studied it in grade six. She had completed a couple of projects, visited the Holocaust museum in her city, and had even tried to find some stories about children her age who had lived during that time. But learning about Chaya Leah through the twinning program was a chance for Gabby to form a personal connection with someone her age who came from her grandfather’s hometown. It was like creating a bond between two families and two young girls, uniting the past and the present.

It is always difficult to find detailed information about children of the Holocaust. Unless family members were lucky enough to survive to carry the memories of their relatives forward, the stories of these children have been all but lost to history. Gabby was lucky to be able to connect with Chaya Leah’s brother, Abraham, who filled in some of the missing pieces of Chaya Leah’s life: what she looked like; what her interests were; how she lived before and during the war. Gabby spoke with Abraham and with his daughter. She wrote letters and put together a brochure that was circulated at her Bat Mitzvah, describing what she knew of Chaya Leah’s life. Having a picture of the Dragun family to look at was an additional gift for Gabby. She was able to put a face to Chaya Leah’s name and her story. It created one more meaningful link to the history.

Still, there was much that Gabby was unable to uncover. Even today, Gabby wonders how Chaya Leah coped with knowing that she was facing her own death, how scared she was, and what she was thinking. These are details we will never know about the children who did not survive.

Despite this, Gabby was able to honour Chaya Leah in the most meaningful way. During her Bat Mitzvah speech, Gabby said the following:

When I think of Chaya Leah Dragun, the girl from Poland with whom I have twinned my Bat Mitzvah, I remember that this girl, and most of her family, died in the Holocaust because of the poison of anti-Semitism, a poison which was first spread by the repetition of hateful words. Of course anti-Semitism and the Shoah (Holocaust) involved much more than simple words, but evil acts often follow evil words. Just like many small snowflakes can become a dangerous avalanche, words can become bigger and deadlier…

Sometimes the evil, like the avalanche, is unstoppable and innocent people like Chaya Leah suffer or even die. We have to be so careful about what we say and how we say it. My grandmother used to advise us, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’ I think that is a pretty good rule to adopt …Why don’t we all try to follow it?

Dexter Toronto, Glied-Beliak 2005

‘I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors,’ said Dexter Glied-Beliak in his speech to the congregation during his Bar Mitzvah in 2005. It was February 26, ten days after Dexter had celebrated his real thirteenth birthday, and he was speaking in front of a packed audience of family and friends who had gathered at Beth Tzedek synagogue in Toronto. The weather had cooperated on that winter day; no snowstorms to interfere with the special event.

Dexter’s Bar Mitzvah was made all the more important by the presence in the audience of his grandfather, Bill Glied. For his Bar Mitzvah, Dexter had chosen to honour and remember a child who had died during the Holocaust. And that child was his grandfather’s sister, Aniko Glied.

Aniko was born on August 26 1936 in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). Her family called her Pippi; she was a gentle and quiet girl with a warm beautiful smile that lit up a room. She had long dark hair, which she would braid and wear in pigtails, held in place with big white bows. Like other children her age, Pippi played piano and went to a local public school. The Glied family of Subotica attended the large synagogue in the centre of town. Of the 100 000 citizens of Subotica, approximately 6000 were Jews, mostly wealthy families involved in farming or, like the Glieds, in the flour milling business. The wealth and freedom that these families had known quickly began to disappear in 1941 as the war was escalating. By 1944, all the Jews of Subotica had been moved to a ghetto, and shortly after that, they were all taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. Pippi and her mother were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Bill was one of only four hundred Jews of Subotica to survive.

He never spoke very much about his experiences during the war. Like many survivors, Bill found it too painful to talk about that time and what had happened to his family. At times, he even felt guilty that he had survived when his sister, parents and so many others had perished. ‘I build a firewall around those memories,’ Bill said. He was particularly reluctant to share his history with his children and grandchildren.

It was Dexter’s mother’s idea to have her son participate in a twinning project for his Bar Mitzvah. As soon as she told Dexter about the idea, he was eager to do something. Dexter knew about the Holocaust; had learnt a lot about it in school. And he had always been drawn to the stories that he had heard of survivors and victims of that time. But he didn’t know much about his grandfather’s history. And so began his journey to discover his grandfather’s and Pippi’s story.

Dexter began to meet with his grandfather, interviewing him about his life before and during the war, and learning what he could of his grandfather’s little sister. The most difficult time was when Dexter learnt about what had happened to Pippi after the family had been deported to Auschwitz. The last time his grandfather saw his sister was when they arrived in the death camp. When the doors to their cattle car were opened, his grandfather remembered seeing the blinding light of the morning sun. In the next moment, they were ordered off the train and were separated into lines. Pippi and her mother were sent to the right, and immediately to their death. “I never said goodbye to them,” his grandfather said to Dexter. “I never saw them again.”

Listening to his grandfather’s story, Dexter was shocked and outraged. He himself has two younger brothers and one older sister, and couldn’t imagine losing a member of his family in that way. ‘I am the age my grandfather was when this was happening to him,’ said Dexter. ‘It’s so unfair to think that this could have happened.’ Dexter is tall and articulate, with a warm smile and dark curly hair. He is athletic and loves sports of all kinds: hockey, basketball, swimming, water skiing. But his true passion is music, and he listens to everything from classical to country. Dexter is the oldest grandson and has always been close to his grandfather; he even looks like him. But this experience of twinning with his grandfather’s sister brought the two of them even closer. And a remarkable thing began to happen for Dexter’s grandfather. As painful as it had always been for him to talk about his history, he found the twinning of his grandson and his little sister to be a joyous event. ‘With my grandson, there are voices now to carry my story forward,’ he said.

Aniko (Pippi) Glied August 26, 1936–May 1944

Dexter echoes that sentiment. He ended his speech in the synagogue by saying, ‘In celebrating my Bar Mitzvah I chose to honour someone who died in the Holocaust because I feel it is my duty to never forget.’