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Holocaust Remembrance Day is being celebrated today around the world. In Halifax this evening (April 8), WLU Press author Israel Unger will give the keynote speech and celebrate the publication of his new book, The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger, a collaboration with Carolyn Gammon. For more events in the Atlantic region, see the press release and tour schedule.

The book is the latest in the Life Writing series from WLU Press, which “promotes autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives.”

We have been fortunate here to have worked with a number of survivors of the Holocaust and to hear their stories firsthand. Without exception these men and women have been deeply principled, humble about their accomplishments, and an honour to know.

Elisabeth Raab: Elisabeth M. Raab was born in Hungary in 1921. In 1944 she was deported with her mother, father and daughter to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She alone survived and was liberated by the Americans in 1945. Her book And Peace Never Came paints a brief yet moving picture of her idyllic life before her internment and the shock and the horrors of Auschwitz, but it is in the images of life after her liberation, that Raab imparts her most poignant story — a story told in a clear, almost sparse, always honest style, a story of the brutal, and, at times, the beautiful facts of human nature.

Israel Unger: At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, after decades of silence, here is Unger’s “unwritten diary.”

Johanna Krause: Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in postwar East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907–2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story.

Michael Englishman: 163256: A Memoir of Resistance is Michael Englishman’s astonishing story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath, from the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, to his eventual liberation by Allied soldiers in 1945 and his emigration to Canada. Surviving by his wits, Englishman escaped death time and again, committing daring acts of bravery to do what he thought was right—helping other prisoners escape and actively participating in the underground resistance.

Imre Rochlitz: Accident of Fate is a first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia. At the age of thirteen, Imre Rochlitz fled to Yugoslavia from his childhood home in Vienna following the NaziAnschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942 the Ustashe (Croatian Fascists) arrested and interned him in the Jasenovac death camp, where he dug mass graves. On the verge of death, Rochlitz was released due to the extraordinary intervention of a Nazi general. He escaped to the Adriatic coast, where he and several thousand other Jewish refugees were protected by the army of Fascist Italy. After Italy’s surrender, he joined Tito’s Partisans, becoming an officer and army veterinarian, and rescued dozens of downed Allied airmen. In 1945, he fled Yugoslavia’s Communist regime and reached liberated southern Italy. In 1947, at the age of twenty-two, he emigrated to the United States.

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After the presentation I took part in a guided tour through downtown Kitchener called Made in Kitchener: Personal Stories from our Industrial Past. At each spot we stopped and, using a QR Code to connect through our smart phones, we listened to stories from people who had worked and/or lived in a nearby historical building (or, in some cases, a building that used to be on that spot). To keep the tour moving along, we abbreviated each presentation, but much more is available on the website, and there participants are encouraged to contribute their insights. This is a fascinating project that links historical buildings in the core to real people, telling their stories of a time past. I was reminded often throughout the tour of the many men and women who have contributed their stories to our Life Writing series.

Kitchener was a thriving hub of industry, but manufacturing has declined and has been mostly replaced by the knowledge industry (thriving in both Kitchener and Waterloo). This digital presentation honours both those traditions. I am looking forward to spending more time on all of these sites and reacquainting myself with fascinating local history.

Related Reading:

Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (Christl Verduyn, editor)

Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties (Edna Staebler)

Food That Really Schmecks (Edna Staebler)

Liberty Is Dead: A Canadian in Germany, 1938 (Margaret Derry, editor)

Watermelon Syrup (Annie Jacobsen, Jane Finlay-Young, and Di Brandt)

The Battle for Berlin (W.R. Chadwick)

I Have a Story to Tell You (Seemah Berson)

(Thank you to Jasmine Mangalaseril for permission to use the image of the famous Rigglevake Kucha as our icon for the Schmecks app)

post by Clare Hitchens

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	Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global InsecurityTarah Brookfield $39.95 Paper, 270 pp. 978-1-55458-623-3
	Canadian Social Policy: Issues and Perspectives5th Edition Anne Westhues and Brian Wharf, editors $52.95 Paper, 456 pp. 978-1-55458-359-1
	The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal ElegiesTanis MacDonald $85.00 Hardcover, 350 pp. 978-1-55458-362-1
	Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and TranslationEva C. Karpinski $39.95 Paper, 282 pp. 978-1-55458-357-7
	Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking BeyondInterfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors $85.00 Hardcover, 388 pp. 978-1-55458-364-5
	Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in DialogueDiana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, editors $85.00 Hardcover, 330 pp. 978-1-55458-264-8

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Fostering Nation? is also shortlisted for the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, awarded by the Canadian Historical Association for the non-fiction work of Canadian history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past. The winner will be announced at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is being hosted jointly by Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo from May 26-June 2, 2012.

Fostering Nation? breaks new ground in the history of social welfare and the family. By offering the first-ever comprehensive look at how Canada cared for marginalized youngsters between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, it tells heart-breaking stories that were the reality for children in foster care, and serves as a reminder that children’s welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her previous awards include the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History and, with Carole Gerson, the Raymond Klibansky Prize in the Humanities

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We’re packing up said archives and deciding which will come with us, which can be stored off-site and which are ok to recycle/shred. Printouts of emails that say “let’s have a meeting tomorrow at 2″ can probably safely be discarded.

Sometimes you come across treasure, though. Yesterday I was moving author files from the file cabinets to the moving boxes and a postcard fell out. It’s from Stan Brakhage, the late American experimental filmmaker. In 1999, WLU Press released The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson, by R. Bruce Elder. The postcard from Brakhage was to thank us for his complimentary copies. The message shows a man full of grace and gratitude for the attention paid his films, and I reproduce it here:

I am very appreciative of the extraordinary insights into my film-making which Bruce Elder has provided therein, and deeply grateful to Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press for extending these insights to the public-at-large. The book is beautifully balanced in the hand, IS a beauty on sight, the print exactly right (it seems to me) … the whole FEEL of it, from paper to cover, of an excellence rare today. In short, I am overjoyed and meaningfully honored.

What a joy it was to find this in the files! I’m going to keep it in mind as we slog on and hope that more treasure like this comes our way.

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There is no doubt that there is much work to be done, both internationally, as contributors to The Global Food Crisis (Clapp/Cohen) attest, and nationally, as shown in our social work texts, like Cruel But Not Unusual: Violence in Canadian Families (Alaggia/Vine) and Moving Toward Positive Systems of Child and Family Welfare (Cameron et al.). Also troubling are persistent cultural biases in media, as Cheryl Krasnick Warsh explores in her forthcoming collection Gender, Health, and Popular Culture.

But our books also explore the roles and celebrate the accomplishments of women in literature, the arts, politics, and other areas. On this day we celebrate the women who are the authors of these books and the women about whom they are written. Here is just a selection of our women’s studies titles:

The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (Brenda Austin-Smith and George Melnyk, editors)

Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry (Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, editors)

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures (Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, editors)

Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies in Canada and Quebec (Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, and Francine Descarries, editors)

Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery, and Prostitution, CWFN Vol. 8 (Lynn McDonald, editor)

The Feminine Gaze: A Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836–1945 (Anne Innis Dagg)

Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (Carole Gerson)

Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada (Barbara M. Freeman)

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In 1989 Canada signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In two books Katherine Covell and R. Brian Howe discuss how Canada has (or, more accurately, has not) kept their commitments to our nation’s children, reminding us that the obligation does not end with the signing but continues through ratification and implementation of recommendations into policy and practice.

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“By remembering their service and their sacrifice, we recognize the tradition of freedom these men and women fought to preserve. They believed that their actions in the present would make a significant difference for the future, but it is up to us to ensure that their dream of peace is realized. On Remembrance Day, we acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of those who served their country and acknowledge our responsibility to work for the peace they fought hard to achieve.”

One way that many people like to pay tribute to the soldiers is by visiting the battlefields.  WLU Press distributes a number of battlefield guides published by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. Written by military historians and supplemented with full colour maps and photos, these guides focus on battles in Normandy, Italy, Northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Other titles in military history and engagement include Germany’s Western Front,  Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment, Afghanistan: Transition under Threat, A Nation at War, 1939-1945, and A Duffle Bag, Close Friends, and Lots of Memories.

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