Published: Thursday, September 07, 2006
MONTREAL - At the age of 11, childhood friends Esther Grauer and Tova Weiszner survived a six-month death march and three years in a Ukrainian prison together during the Holocaust, begging food from villagers and melting snow to survive.
They lost each other after the war, but trod similar paths, settling in Canada and raising families.
About 20 years ago, a support organization for Holocaust survivors put them in touch, but they hadn't seen each other in person since just after they had left prison.
Sixty-two years, five children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren later, the survivors were reunited Wednesday at Montreal's Pierre Trudeau International Airport.
''Do you have a Valium? I can't believe I forgot my Valium,'' Grauer, 77, asked moments before the reunion. ''I don't want to make a scene.''
But there was no scene. Only shiny eyes, throats choked by emotion and the silent embrace of friends who have experienced too much and haven't seen each other since 1944.
''I have no words,'' Weiszner, 76, said. ''There are no words. I am speechless.''
Friends since Grade 2 at their Hebrew elementary school in Lipcani, Romania (now a part of Moldova), Grauer and Weiszner and their families were among more than a thousand Jews forced from their homes in 1941 by the Nazis and the Romanian army, travelling on foot for six months until they reached the Ukrainian prison barracks they would live in for three years.
Those who couldn't walk any further were shot.
Grauer arrived with her mother and younger sister, Weiszner with her father, pregnant mother and brother. ''It wasn't a four-star hotel,'' Weiszner said. ''We slept on the cement floor; there were no beds or even mattresses. And there was no food.''
They would sneak under the barbed wire before dawn (''If the soldiers saw us, they would shoot us'') and beg from villagers who risked their lives to help them.
In prison, Grauer remembers melting snow for water and rinsing potato skins discarded by the Romanian and German guards to eat.
Bodies of the dead were carried out daily. Weiszner's parents and her newborn sibling were among them, succumbing to typhus and malnutrition.
Disease and lice were rampant because prisoners were not allowed to bathe.
''Imagine not having a shower for three years,'' Weiszner said.
Weiszner and Grauer's parents, hearing of a new law protecting young prisoners with no parents, made the children pose as orphans so they would be sent back to orphanages in Romania.
Grauer eventually reunited with her mother and sister. Weiszner never saw her parents again.
The friends last saw each other in Bucharest in 1944. Separately, both travelled to Israel in the late '40s, married and had children.
Grauer emigrated to Montreal in 1958. She recently became a great-grandmother.
Weiszner stayed in Israel for 12 years, then emigrated to Winnipeg, where her husband earned 80 cents an hour as a tailor and she made 50 cents at any job she could get: working in a factory, cooking for a day-care, washing floors.
They raised three children, two who became dentists and the other who works at a university. She also recently became a great-grandmother.
''I've been lucky,'' says the diminutive Weiszner. ''I've had a good life. I have good children. They're healthy. They're not in prison.''
Her one regret, however, shared by Grauer, is that they took so long to see each other.
Montreal Gazette
© CanWest News Service