Alex Levin recalled how his brother's strong, trembling
hand took hold of his own and they started to run.
It would be a sprint for their survival.
Levin was just nine years old when Nazis overran his
Polish birthplace of Rokitno in June 1941.
The following August, with a massacre of the town's Jews
imminent, his older brother dragged him away from the
crowd.
For 18 months, they would have only their wits
and resilience to rely on.
They lived among 10 people in a cave in the forests in
Poland, gathering and eating wild mushrooms and
berries. They would go to villages and beg for food --
or steal it.
And they relied on mountains of ants in the
forests to eat the eggs and lice off their clothes to
get them clean.
"(We) were always scared,'' said Levin, "but it was a
question of survival.''
The 77-year-old is among the Holocaust survivors who
shed light on a dark period in history by writing
personal stories of heroism and the journeys that
brought them and their families to Canada.
Excerpts of Levin's story and others will be shared
Monday at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, marking the
launch of the second series of the award-winning
Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.
The event will be narrated and presented by veteran CBC
journalist Joe Schlesinger with a keynote address from
Defiance author Nechama Tec.
The memoirs program was established in 2005 by the
Azrieli Foundation, a Canadian philanthropic
organization supporting a range of programs, including
Holocaust commemoration and education.
The program was intended to preserve and share the
memoirs and diaries written by Holocaust survivors who
later made their way to Canada.
The first series of books was released in 2007. The
second features eight volumes -- five in English, three
in French -- gathered from some 170 submissions across
Canada.
