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d of Bernie Farber . . . Farber, of the Canadian Jewish Congress spoke at Northwestern University (Chicago) on [Glossary: Holocaust survivor : n., Somebody to whom nothing happened. –> Son of Holocaust survivor , n., c.1970: son of somebody to whom nothing happened. –> Deriv.: Bernie Farber: n., proper: Canadian son of somebody to whom nothing happened 5,000 miles away.]
The Daily Northwestern Chicago, January 20, 2003 Speaker: Don’t let history die with its participants Son of Holocaust survivor tells crowd to preserve families’ forgotten stories By Greg Lowe BERNIE Farber didn’t realize he had two half-brothers until 21 years after they were killed in a Nazi death camp.
Farber, the executive director of the Ontario region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, spoke Sunday to a crowd of about 25 people in the McCormick-Tribune Forum about his effort to learn about the life [that] his father — and his father’s former family — led before the Holocaust. Farber was brought to campus by the Tannenbaum Chabad House, where he gave another lecture Friday night on the evils of anti-Zionism .
After escaping the fate of the rest of his small Polish village, Farber’s father, Max , came to Canada and started a new life. Until 1974, Farber and his brothers were unaware that Max had a previous family killed in the Holocaust. Since that revelation, Farber tried to learn his father’s past. Max died in 1990 at the age of 92. “How did my father manage to start a second life?” he asked. “How did my father put away such pain and such tragedy?”
It wasn’t until Farber’s mother was dying that Max finally told his sons about his life in the Polish village of Botchki, a life that included a different wife and two children. While Max and a cousin survived by jumping off a train headed for a concentration camp, the rest of his family was killed in a Nazi gas chamber, Farber said.
David Irving comments: I DON’T normally comment on news items like this, not even on the absurdity of a son of a Holocaust survivor stealing the door off a stove in his father’s old home in Poland. The mind briefly boggles: How did he explain it to Canada Customs when he returned? “It’s a door. Off an oven. A gas oven. It’s okay. I’m a survivor, uh, son of a survivor.”
No, my curiosity is aroused by the ease with which Farber tells his crowded Chicago audience of 25, without any proof, that his other family of stepmother and half brothers were killed in a Nazi gas chamber. If it were my father, I’d be curious to know more. Which camp? Killed, or died in an epidemic? And how did my father manage to save his own skin, abandoning his wife and two sons to their fate? And how come that he never mentioned this tragedy earlier to his new Canadian son Bernie?
As so often, stories like this seem to prompt more questions than they answer. Related file: