Auschwitz account ‘opportunity to wake people up’

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This article was published 18/01/2020 (2459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I was born in 1928 in Czechoslovakia. I had a normal life, a nice close Jewish family. I had five sisters. One of my sisters was my twin… In 1944, they got to us. We were taken from our home. We were rounded up. We were put into these cattle cars and taken to our destination: Auschwitz.”

So begins In My Father’s Words, a first-person telling by Richard Lowy of his father Leo’s story of surviving the infamous Nazi death camp.

“My father never talked it,” says Lowy, 61. “He didn’t want to burden us.”

Leo Lowy and his twin sister, Miriam, emigrated to Canada as orphans in 1948. He said nothing about their experience in the Holocaust until the late 1990s.

That’s when he began to open up about how they were subjected to horrific medical experiments by Josef Mengele, the so-called “angel of death.”

That led to a return to Auschwitz in 2000, and to the creation in 2001 of Leo’s Journey, a documentary on what happened in Auschwitz to his father and aunt, and to other twins.

“I did what I wanted to do by telling that story,” said Richard Lowy, a resident of Vancouver. “It had it’s run. Then I went on with my life.”

His father died in 2002. In 2013, Lowy was surprised to discover an interview his father gave to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1985.

“I found out more about him than I had known before,” Lowy said of listening to his father recount his story for researchers.

That led to a desire to tell a more comprehensive account of this father’s experience. “He was more a witness in the documentary,” Lowy said. “It didn’t tell his full story.”

During his first-person presentation, Lowy takes on the character of his father as he repeats the interview.

“When I tell it, people forget it’s me. They think I’m Leo,” he said.

As for Leo’s twin sister, Miriam, she also survived the camps.

But due to the trauma she suffered, including electric shocks, she led a tragic life.

“She never recovered from the experience,” Lowy said. “It was very sad.”

His father suffered but found a way to rise above it, becoming a popular and well-liked businessman in Vancouver.

Now that Leo is gone, “it’s my job to tell my father’s story,” said Lowy.

Noting the rise of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism around the world — and the fact almost all the Holocaust survivors are gone — telling his father’s story has taken on greater urgency, he said.

“It’s an opportunity to wake people up, show how far into the depths evil people can go, and ask if we really want to go down that road again,” Lowy said.

“I’m telling it so, hopefully, nobody else has to take Leo’s journey.”

Lowy will present In My Father’s Words at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Jan. 26, 1:30 p.m., as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The documentary Leo’s Journey will also be shown.

Admission is free, but a ticket is required by visiting the CMHR website.

The event marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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