MARKING HUMANITY: STORIES, POEMS, & ESSAYS BY HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
EDITED BY SHLOMIT KRIGER
By Darryl Salach
The League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada reported in the year 2009 that incidents of anti-Semitic behaviour had increased nearly five-fold in Canada. Around the world, acts of anti-Semitism and the denial of historical events pertaining to the Holocaust having ever taken place, have also seen a significant rise in recent years. In reflection of these startling facts, local Toronto writer and editor Shlomit Kriger has compiled a wondrous anthology titled Marking Humanity: Stories, Poems, & Essays by Holocaust Survivors (Soul Inscriptions Press, 2010).
The stories within this anthology are startling and unique to say the least. George Scott (formerly Spiegel) was born in Hungary in 1930 and now resides in Toronto. His grandparents, who raised him, placed him in a Budapest Jewish Orphanage after he completed Grade four, and there were one-hundred-and-twenty boys, aged six to eighteen. He tried to run away from the orphanage when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, but he was caught on the border of Slovakia and taken to Sarvar, a large concentration camp, and later sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. He writes in his poem Auschwitz 1944, “Not close enough for warmth / The lusty flames / In the crematorium’s busy chimney / Rise and fall / Indifferent lies / The barbed wire’s shadow / On the frozen ground / Very thin is the line / Between being and not being / The night is emptied.”
