Jewish Book Fest finale
February 14th, 2022
Two B.C. authors will be launching books on the last day of the JCC Jewish Book Festival, Tuesday, April 5 at 7 pm, in-person.
FREE – Register here
Robert Krell, one of B.C.’s major educators about the Holocaust, has recently published his memoir Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher (Amsterdam Publishers $21.95). “I have long described child Holocaust survivors as ‘elderly children’,” writes Krell. “We were forced to grow up overnight and lost pieces of childhood – of play and security, of comfort and predictability, of parental love and guidance. Those few of us fortunate to have survived have spent lifetimes catching up on what we missed. This account reflects the life journey of such a child.”
Author of twenty books, Alan Twigg will discuss Out Of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia (Ronsdale $21.95). This cross-section of stories collected from British Columbia, examining 85 authors and 160 books, addresses the loss of eye-witnesses to the Holocaust by documenting their histories in book form. Outstanding characters include the heroic whistleblower, Rudolf Vrba, credited by historian Sir Martin Gilbert with saving at least 100,000 lives, as well as Robbie Waisman, likely the only person ever to sneak his way into Nazi prison camps, twice. Discoveries include Dr. Tom Perry’s never-published photos of just-liberated Buchenwald, a little-known Warsaw Ghetto memoir by Stanislav Adler, and Jennie Lifschitz, perhaps the only Canadian-born Jew to have survived the camps (who is featured on the book cover). This patchwork quilt of memory and history is the first of its kind to have a regional lens from somewhere in North America.
Yosef Wosk, who contributed an Afterword to Out of Hiding, will moderate the event.
Robert Krell (left) and Alan Twigg (right).
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ROBERT KRELL was born in Holland and survived the Holocaust in hiding. After the war, the family moved to Vancouver and he became professor of psychiatry at UBC, often treating Holocaust survivor families and Dutch survivors of Japanese concentration camps. He was founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre which teaches 20,000 students annually. He is a member of the Order of Canada.
ALAN TWIGG is an author and the founding publisher of BC BookWorld . He is a member of the Order of Canada and has received the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
YOSEF WOSK was inducted as an Officer of The Order of Canada in 2020 for his extensive contributions as a scholar, writer and educator, and for his wide-ranging philanthropy. Former director of Interdisciplinary Programs in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser University, he founded the Philosophers Cafe and the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars.
Josef Wosk (left) with Elie Wiesel in Vancouver. Photo Dina Goldstein.
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