Holocaust survivor adopts activism

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This article was published 26/10/2019 (2455 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Suzanne Berliner Weiss has dedicated her life to improving the welfare of others. It is an honourable and admirable pursuit — especially considering the tragedy and trauma that characterized Weiss’s early life.

Weiss, who was born in France, spent years in the United States and now lives in Toronto, chronicles that past in her moving and motivating memoir Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey. Written with clarity and honesty, and few embellishments, the memoir explores Weiss’s life as a hidden child during the Holocaust, as a child adopted by an American couple after the Holocaust and as a socialist and activist throughout her adult life.

Weiss’s biological parents were progressive Polish and Ukrainian Jews living in France when Germany occupied the country. Determined to keep their young daughter alive, they arranged for her to be hidden with a rural Christian family. At war’s end, Weiss’s father came to fetch her but, mortally wounded, he left her in the care of a friend who later sent her to an orphanage. Weiss’s mother never appeared; she had been murdered in Auschwitz.

After living in a series of orphanages with other refugee children, Weiss was finally adopted by a well-meaning American Jewish couple and brought to the U.S. But that experience, too, was fraught with instability, insecurity and “obsessive unresolved disagreements” between Weiss and her adoptive parents. By the time she was a teenager, Weiss was determined to distance herself from her new family.

But she didn’t remain alone. Instead, Weiss settled into the arms of a different kind of family, finding the love, support and sense of belonging she had always craved in the people and politics of the Socialist Workers Party.

Immersed in the day-to-day workings of the party, Weiss travelled to Cuba on the eve of revolution, demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, rallied against nuclear arms proliferation and U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and fought for women’s rights, workers’ rights and black power.

“Freedom, equality, brotherhood, the right to democratically choose your future,” she writes. “Those were my hopes for the world.”

Weiss’s description of her early life is engaging and moving, but her examination of her involvement in these larger issues, and of the issues themselves, make this tell-all unique. While some may disagree with her politics, you can’t deny the basic sense of goodness that influenced them.

Weiss emphasizes that her early life was plagued by abandonment, fear and loneliness, yet she was able to marshal her personal losses — of freedom, family and the promise of her future — in the struggle for self-determination, equality and dignity for disenfranchised people worldwide.

Later in life, Weiss moved to Canada and undertook efforts to find out more about her birth parents, their own sense of righteousness and how their fate affected their daughter’s future.

She also renewed her commitment to activism. Today, in her late 70s, she continues to speak up and stand up for Indigenous land claims and the rights of the elderly, and against pipelines and climate change deniers.

Her Jewish history, as troubled as it was, demands she does so. There is no other way.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer.