By Jon Wells | Reporter

A live orchestra was the first thing Vera Weiner heard, after stepping from pitch black into harsh light at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

“Classical music,” she says. “Oh my God, I will never forget.”

She had sat on the floor of a packed rail car for several days. The music seemed an attempt by the Nazis to lull them into a sense of calm, even as they saw prisoners who appeared cadaverous.

It was 1944 and Vera was 13; a Jewish girl from Hungary shipped to the camp with her mother, sister, aunt, and grandparents. Her father had already vanished.

She lost them all.

This week — Holocaust Education Week — she spoke in her west Hamilton apartment, reflecting on life and death.

Articulate and animated, she has lived on her own since her husband, Robert, died 45 years ago of a heart attack.

Out her living room window, faded leaves were clinging to tree branches.

Vera Barany — her married name — is a survivor of the systematic genocide of nearly six million Jewish people by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust during the Second World War. About one million were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.

She is living history. And wonders why she was spared.

“You do think, how come me, and not them?”

She describes a critical moment in 1944. She was standing among a group of women assessed for fitness to leave Auschwitz by train, to work as weavers in a legitimate textile factory.

They were ordered to undress in front of a Nazi SS man. Vera was a frail girl. She shook with fear. The SS man ordered her to remain in the camp. She knew it meant death.

But when the SS man left the inspection area, other women begged a German soldier on guard to spare Vera. He briefly turned his back — intentionally, she always believed — allowing the women to herd Vera among them, clothe her, and get her on a train to the factory, and the rest of her life.

It was at war’s end, after Vera returned home to Hungary, that she learned for certain what others had told her: the rest of her family had been killed.

“I cried all the time,” she says.

An eye witness survivor told her that Vera’s sister and aunt had been forced to dig their own graves, and then shot.

At 18, she arrived in Canada, brought over with other Jewish orphans by the Canadian Jewish Congress.

She soon settled in Hamilton, where she eventually raised two daughters and worked in a fabric store downtown, and taught adult sewing courses.

She smiles, remembering her early months in the city, when her new life kept the sadness at bay.

“It was such a change, everything was beautiful here. Christmas came, and there were all the lights, and you are young and fall in love. But in older age, the memories; they are buried for awhile, and then they come.”

Over the years she gave talks to students about her Holocaust experience. After her presentations, students would line up and shake her hand. Some hugged her.

She keeps a pile of the feedback forms they filled out.

“Very moving … Vera is a courageous woman,” wrote one Mohawk College student.

“I had to contain my tears,” wrote another.

“Vera has changed a part of me.”

One day, a student approached her, crying, saying that she was sorry.

The student was on an exchange from Germany. She said members of her family had been Nazis.

“I hugged her and said honey, you are not responsible for their mistakes.”

Vera turns 94 on Dec. 7. She has lost many friends, including fellow Holocaust survivors with whom she had instantly felt a bond.

“There are not many of us left.”

The exhibit features items including a concentration camp prisoner’s uniform, historical documents such as the infamous anti-Jewish propaganda tabloid Der Sturmer, and a striking steel sculpture created in the mid-1960s, titled “Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust” by artist George Wallace, who taught at McMaster. 

The final panels of the exhibit had included the definition of the Holocaust, and antisemitism — until a new panel was added after Oct. 7, 2023, to mark the Hamas terror attack in Israel.

This panel, said Hamilton Jewish Federation CEO Gustavo Rymberg, is meant to inspire reflection that antisemitism is not something that happened long ago but “is still mutating in different ways.”

Additional artifacts on display include a yellow Star of David, worn by Hamilton’s Nadia Rosa as a child, while interned by the Nazis at the Theresienstadt transit camp and ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

Ernie Mason, a Holocaust survivor also featured in the exhibit, told the Spectator that education about hate, with respect to Jews or anyone else, is critical.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to know that you are hated, or not looked upon as an equal,” he says, adding that “antisemitism is on the rise again worldwide. Nothing has really changed, the hate is still there.”

his week the centre featured speaker Yoni Berrous, from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Israel, to present a seminar to local educators on how to teach about the Holocaust (the subject enters the curriculum in Ontario in Grade 6). 

Vera Barany remembers a moment years ago, when a journalist interviewing her asked what she had learned from the Holocaust.

At first, the question offended her.

“But then, the more I thought about it, the more I had the answer,” she says.

“You know what I learned? That they can take everything away from you, but not the love you have in your heart. And I learned to appreciate everything. I don’t expect much, either. I expect the bad just as much. And I’m really grateful.”

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