Survivor Helps Sherwood Mark Holocaust Education Week

Michael Mason had a story to tell at Sherwood.

Michael Mason in conversation with Elin Beaumont.

He was 15 when Germany occupied Hungary in 1944. Yellow stars appeared on his neighbours’ coats. He borrowed a Christian friend’s ID, but was still sent into forced labour and eventually to the deadly Auschwitz-Birkenau and Muhldorf concentration camps.

But Mason had a story – of luck, chutzpah and hope – because he survived the Holocaust in which Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed six million Jewish people in Europe. Mason’s story gave history exquisite and painful details as he spoke Nov. 5 for Holocaust Education Week.

“I was a kid, completely lost and in a daze – I didn’t know what was happening,” Mason recalled in a video about his arrival in Auschwitz after a two-day rail journey in a cattle car without food or water. “The SS, the dogs, the shooting and yelling… it was total panic.”

Mason’s visit was organized by teacher Dina Reda, the Hamilton Jewish Federation and the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program of the Azrieli Foundation. On stage, Azrieli Foundation educational co-ordinator Elin Beaumont led Mason in an insightful interview.

Students heard about the creep of anti-semitic laws in Hungary, as Jewish doctors lost their hospital privledges and Jewish lawyers could not appear in courts.

They heard of the cattle carts full of families that arrived at the camps, with dead bodies that had to be retrieved on arrival. Family members panicked when separated from each other, and many parents were shot if they stepped out of line to be with their loved ones.

Mason, who felt reduced to a number in the camps, spoke of the hard labour clearing trees to make way for a German airplane factory. The work was hard enough, but it done while the prisoners were starving: their daily food intake was just a slice of bread, a pat of margarine, some jam and vegetable soup broth.

“In the spring of 1945 we saw American planes. We knew the war was coming to an end and we hoped we would just survive,” said Mason, who remembers being young and hopeful that he could one day just live a more normal life.

In all the cruelty, he remembers his parents being saved by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian who saved tens of thousands of Jewish people by giving them new passports in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Mason spoke of hope, the importance of kindness and need to remember atrocities because some try to deny that the Holocaust even happened.

Michael Mason’s book A Name Unbroken

His story endures thanks to the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust memoir program. Established in 2005, the program has worked to collect, preserve and share the memoirs and diaries of Holocaust survivors who made their way to Canada. The program, which fosters tolerance and diversity in education, distributes its books to schools for free.

“We need to be aware as students of what happened in the past, so that it is not forgotten,” said Kara, a Grade 11 student in Reda’s social justice course. “We could learn in textbooks, but hearing it in person is so powerful and makes it real.”

Watch a video about Mason’s life.