At the start of the pandemic, I began to explore something I had avoided for much of my life – my family’s history and what happened to those relatives who didn’t survive the Holocaust. This investigation turned out to be quite difficult and complicated since most Holocaust survivors in my family have since passed away. This three-year journey turned into a book, Out From the Shadows: Growing Up With Holocaust Survivor Parents, which will be released in late 2024. It’s an investigative memoir describing my family’s past and how I uncovered the information. This page highlights the Handler Family’s past in photos.

This was my mom’s family. My mom (Shifra Zloczower) was the youngest (approximately 4 years old in this photo). She was born in Comanesti, a tiny village in Romania. Two aunts and an uncle left Europe before WW II.

This photo was taken in the mid-1930s. My grandfather produced and sold brandy made from sour cherries, which was popular in Romania and called vişinată (Vishnu in Yiddish). They raised some livestock, including this cow.

In 1940, there was a pogrom in Comanesti led by Romanian soldiers. My mom’s house and all the homes of Jewish families were destroyed. The pogrom survivors were evicted from the village.

On my mother’s side, I lost both grandparents and one uncle in the Holocaust. The rest of the family survived, enduring horrible conditions in a ghetto in Transnistria, Ukraine. My grandfather was murdered in September 1941. He was the only grandparent who had an actual funeral. His grave still exists in Suceava, Romania.

My dad (Elija Oksenhendler) lived in Bedzin, Poland, at the start of the war. In this photo taken in Spring 1942 are my grandmother with two aunts (on the left) and my dad’s wife and two daughters (on the right). Everyone in this photo was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942 and sent directly to the gas chambers. The little girls Laja and Jenta were just 27 months and 11 months old when they perished. No photo exists of my grandfather. My dad and 3 siblings survived the Holocaust in various slave labour camps.

When I visited Bedzin in 2022, I was able to view my father’s marriage registration to Estera Sledzik and the birth registrations of their daughters, Laja and Jenta. The documents were in German, as this region of Poland was annexed into the Reich during the war, and the official language was German.

While in Bedzin, I located the tenement building where my family lived until the Germans deported them. They occupied a first-floor apartment at 38 Malachowskiego Street. The above photo of my family was taken in the courtyard behind the building.

Prisoners at each camp were registered and issued prisoner numbers. The only registration card that survived the war was from the Gross Rosen concentration camp. His prisoner number was 12774.

My dad (on the left) survived 7 concentration camps before he was finally liberated by the French in the Bisingen concentration camp in April 1945. My dad posed in his concentration camp outfit sometime after liberation and, by then, had regained some of the weight he had lost.

Following liberation, my mother illegally immigrated to Palestine in 1946. My father arrived after Israel was created in 1948. They met and were married on March 17, 1949. Below is their Israeli marriage certificate.

My parents were married on March 17, 1949 in Isreal. This is their marriage certificate.

My mother’s brother Joshua Zloczower deserted from the Romanian army in 1936 and moved to Palestine, avoiding the Holocaust. Her oldest sisters, Mary and Ruth, left Romania in the 1920s (before my mother was born) to get away from anti-Semitism in Europe.

My parents and sister Tamara arrived in Canada on March 29, 1953, at Pier 21 in Halifax. This was their Immigration card. They rode a train to Toronto to begin a new life.

My father’s first job was slaughtering chickens at the Toronto Packing Company in Kensington Market, predominantly a Jewish market, until the 1970s. He then sold chickens in a poultry shop on Baldwin Street in the Market, the same type of shop he had owned in Bedzin before the war.

Within the first year, I was born, and my parents bought our first house at 1033 Bathurst Street. About a year later, my brother Irv was born.

We never took family vacations, so I looked forward to summer camp, where I could escape the boredom of the city.

Here I am with my parents in 1966 at my Bar Mitzvah.

My parents later in life. When they passed away, my mother at 86 and my father at 96, they had defied the Nazis by surviving to have 3 children and 6 grandchildren.