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it was when Saul Feldberg died in Toronto on Jan. 13 at the age of 87. Feldberg built Canada’s largest furniture manufacturing businesses, the Global Furniture Group and Teknion Corp. His story was novel-worthy: He started sweeping floors in a small furniture business when he arrived in Canada as a teenager with his parents in 1953. Born in Poland in 1935, Saul’s mother saved his life by arran- ging for false documents and making the dangerous journey to reunite with his father in Russian-occupied Lvov. “We were always running from something,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We ran from the bombs, from hunger, from the German army. We ran to survive.” Like many who shared his experience, he did more than merely survive.
Alex Buckman
“The rst thing I do is check the obits page,” goes the old Borscht Belt crack. “If I’m not there, I get up.”
philanthropy and communal service. Another child survivor of the Holocaust was Alex Buckman, a tireless educator and advocate for fellow child survivors who died in Warsaw on April 21. He was 83. In a poetic twist, Buckman was in Poland accompanying the Canadian March of the Living delegation when he died. He served as president of the Vancouver Child Surviv- ors Group and had spoken to thousands of students in British Columbia through the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Born in Brussels, he was seven months old when Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. At age two, his parents sent him into hiding, and he would find shelter in a dozen different non-Jewish homes. In his 2017 memoir Afraid of the Dark , Buckman wrote that he felt compelled to share his story for two reasons: “First, I want others to know the price of hate. Hate destroys the lives of innocent people. It breaks families apart and its effects are felt for a lifetime. Second, and most importantly, I share my story to honour the memory of my par- ents. Talking about our stories gives them a chance to live again and gives me the opportunity to remember them.”
younger sister Lily into hiding with a peasant couple who had worked with my grandfather prior to the war,” eulogized Tamar Gold- stein, Mira’s daughter. “At the age of eight, Mira was separated from her parents and burdened with the responsibility of making sure her younger sister did not unwittingly reveal their Jewish identity when they were in hiding.” The girls and their parents survived and immigrated to Toronto when Mira was 12. “She was an ardent Zionist,” understated her daughter. With her husband Saul, Koschitzky would go on to volunteer for a slew of Israel-based and local Jewish advocacy and educational organizations, her name becoming virtually synonymous with
Mira Koschitzky
Now and then, a family member’s eulogy is a nice substitute for a dispassionate obituary. So it was with community stalwart Mira Koschitzky who died on June 11, a few weeks shy of her 88th birthday. Koschitzky was born in 1935 in what was then the Czechoslovak Republic, her childhood cut short by the outbreak of war. “In 1943, her parents placed her and her
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