Tale of survival to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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This article was published 26/01/2021 (2070 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stefan Carter was a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Poland the last time he saw his mother alive.

On that sunny September day in 1942, Stefan and his mother, Janina, were ordered by the Nazis to leave their workplace and assemble at the Umschlagplatz, or collection point, in the Warsaw Ghetto.

With a nod of his head, an SS soldier sent Stefan — who was tall for his age — back to the factory. “They thought I would be good for labour,” he said.

His mother was sent to a train at a nearby railway siding and, ultimately, to her death at the Treblinka concentration camp.

“She was sick,” said Carter, 92, now a retired doctor in Winnipeg. “She may have died on the train on the way, or in the camp. I don’t know.”

For Carter, those memories from long ago are still fresh in his mind, as is his escape from the ghetto.

“It was a miracle,” he said of how relatives managed to smuggle him out and arranged for him to be hidden in the homes of Polish Christians.

Through false papers and learning Christian prayers, the teenager was able to stay alive until the end of the war.

“I don’t know to this day how it happened,” he said. “Maybe it involved bribes, I don’t know.”

On Wednesday, Carter will be the featured speaker as the Winnipeg-based Canadian Museum for Human Rights marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The online event, co-sponsored by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, will mark the 80th anniversary of the sealing of the ghetto and the murder of more than 300,000 Jews who were imprisoned there.

The event will also include a screening of the film Memories of the Warsaw Ghetto, based on the childhood experiences of Eugene Bergman, who was deafened when a Nazi soldier hit him on the head with a rifle butt.

In 1948, at the age of 20, Carter emigrated to Canada, settling in Winnipeg, where he studied medicine and became a renowned vascular specialist. He was also a professor in the Max Rady Faculty of Medicine for more than 40 years, and participated in Manitoba’s first open-heart surgery in 1959.

Looking back, Carter remembers that terrible time in the ghetto and his time avoiding capture by the Nazis. “It was a traumatic experience,” he said.

Unlike some other survivors, some of whom have still nightmares “to this day,” Carter said he was “able to put it behind me and move on.”

In his retirement, he spends his time sharing about that experience and warning about the dangers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and distortion.

“We have to constantly keep talking about it,” Carter said. “The stories of survivors have to be told over and over again.

“Within each of us is the potential for good and evil. Either can’t be brought out,” he said. To prevent future Holocausts, people need to “nurture the good” inside of them.

The event, which starts at noon, will conclude with a question-and-answer period facilitated by Daniel Stone, professor emeritus of history at the University of Winnipeg. Online ASL interpretation will be provided.

For more information and to register, visit http://wfp.to/DSQ. 

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