https://bonmot.ca/~daniel/mackay/wp01/p01_062k.jpg

Photo: my mom, Antwerp Zoo, ca. 1945, "J'Attendrais toujours" - probably sent to her future husband.

It’s been one year since I found out that my grandmother was Jewish, my mother was Jewish, and so, my brothers and I are Jewish.

You can guess that I have spent a bit of time thinking about how and why we didn’t know before.

Everything after that is pure speculation. Here’s my guess:

We know that at some point our mom went to live with her Catholic aunts and uncles. We had always thought this was because she didn’t get along with her stepmom. But - it was a deadly time to be a Jew. When Mom was 17 the Nazis took over Belgium; over 20,000 Belgian Jews were murdered during the war.

So I’m guessing that like many Jews, she concealed her identity with the help of her father’s Catholic family.

Canadians were part of the liberating Allied armies in September 1944, and she met her future husband Walter. His father was “Free Baptist” so we assume he was too. After going on a couple of dates it was probably an impractical time to tell her new boyfriend that she was Jewish, and… then they got married in the Catholic cathedral in Antwerp, and when they moved into the family home in a village on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, it was probably a really impractical time to reveal that, or ever after.

So she just never did. She died 25 years ago; her cousin is gone too. I’m sure she never told anyone about her Jewish background - probably not even Jack and Goldie Stern, the only Jewish family in Barrington Passage in the 1960s and themselves concentration camp survivors. They ran Jack Stern’s Clothing Store, and after she was widowed, my mom worked for them, doing clothing alterations — in the kitchen, on that little sewing machine that we had the birthday party for a few weeks ago.