Students bake cakes to pay tribute to Holocaust survivors

Alex Buckman devoted his life to ensuring that the atrocities of the Holocaust would not be forgotten and would never be repeated. He frequently spoke at public events and in schools about his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, volunteered with the Holocaust Education Centre and child survivor group in Vancouver, and in April 2023, accompanied a group of Canadian Jewish high school students on the March of the Living.

The March of the Living (MOL) is an international Holocaust education program that brings students, and sometimes adults, to the sites of the killing fields and camps that were located in Poland. A highlight of the trip is a silent three-kilometre march from Auschwitz to Birkenau.

In the course of the 2023 trip, Buckman shared details of his life story with the young Canadians, describing to them those he lost and those he grieved, while reiterating his life-long conviction that kindness and humanity could make the world a much better place.

Born in Belgium in 1939, Buckman was hidden with 11 different non-Jewish families as a toddler. At four he was delivered to an orphanage, where he remained until the end of the war. When it became clear that his parents would not be coming to get him — as they had been murdered in Auschwitz — his aunt, Rebecca (Becky) Teitelbaum, took him in and raised him as her own.

His aunt, Buckman related to the enthralled MOL students, had a fascinating and courageous story of her own. As a slave labourer in the German women’s concentration camp, Ravensbrück, she managed to pilfer some brown paper, a pencil and scissors, and surreptitiously began creating a cookbook from family recipes that she and the other prisoners remembered. Somehow that recipe book survived the war and ended up in Teitelbaum’s Montreal home, where Buckman found it decades later.

One of the cookbook recipes was for gateau l’orange, an orange cake that Buckman remembered Teitelbaum baking for her family almost every Sunday after the war. As Buckman related to the MOL students, upon discovering the recipe he began a new tradition of regularly baking the cake himself and sharing it with others, both as a means of honouring his aunt and remembering the horrors of the past. He then asked the students gathered before him to consider doing the same.

“When he shared the testimony of his life during the Holocaust with us, he encouraged all of us to carry out one specific act when we came home,” says Alex Stoller, who was part of the Winnipeg delegation on the 2023 MOL trip. “He wanted us to go home and bake a cake that came from a recipe his aunt wrote while being held in Ravensbrück.”

Tragically, shortly after making that request, Buckman passed away while still in Poland. The sudden death of the man who had educated, inspired and moved them just hours before, severely affected the students in the group. Although almost three years have passed since meeting and losing Buckman, they have not forgotten him.

“While we only knew him for five days, his memory and his wisdom impacted us deeply long after we came home,” Stoller shares.

Learning first-hand about Buckman’s experiences, adds 20-year-old Ethan Levene, who also was part of the Winnipeg delegation, has had a profound effect on his young life.

“I felt compelled to share this knowledge back in Canada, where Holocaust denial and revisionism, as well as other forms of antisemitism, have had immeasurable impacts on the Jewish community,” he explains.

“When thinking of ways to address this, I remembered Alex Buckman’s wishes to us students; share his story, and bake the gâteau à l’orange with family and friends. My rough idea was to simultaneously raise money for Holocaust survivors and education while inviting university students to participate in an event that fulfils those wishes.”

That rough idea is now taking shape as Taste of Hope, an event scheduled for Feb. 1, just five days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The event, being organized by Levene, Stoller, Zahra Slutchuk and other 2023 MOL alumni, will see university students from five Canadian cities, including Winnipeg, get together at various venues to bake Teitelbaum’s orange cakes, while listening to and learning from Buckman’s life story. A concurrent fundraising campaign is seeking support for the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, an organization dear to Buckman.

“We are honouring this dream of Alex Buckman’s with our event,” Slutchuk explains. “Our goal is for university students of all backgrounds to come together to bake this cake and learn about Alex’s remarkable life through Holocaust education. In doing so, we aim to bridge educational gaps, create a forum for mutual respect, and, above all, pay tribute to Holocaust survivors and their bravery in sharing their stories so that we can truly say, ‘Never again.’”

The event, Stoller adds, is a hopeful one.

“While students around Canada and the world have seen antisemitism being normalized on our university campuses,” he says, “this is our chance to combat it, not through force, but through spreading our knowledge to other students and doing our best to implement change in our communities.”

Follow @tastehope on Instagram to learn more about the event and how to participate.

swchisvin@gmail.com

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