By Benjamin Stanislawski

Introduction

Dr. Robert Krell’s life has been a truly remarkable one. He has taken his traumatic upbringing and used it to bring immense goodness into the world. His early childhood was spent living hidden away from his parents under a false Catholic identity in order to avoid Nazi capture. After immigrating to Canada, he pursued a career in psychiatry and has focused on “treatment of aging survivors of massive trauma.”[1] In addition to his medical career, he has worked tirelessly to educate the Vancouver community and beyond about the profound tragedy of the Holocaust, and specifically about the unique experience of child survivors. His work with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, as well a multitude of mediums of Holocaust education, leaves a vast legacy that will continue to educate future generations on the evils of the Holocaust and its lasting impact on those who survived it.[2]

[1] “Robert Krell.” UBC Department of Psychiatry, The University of British Columbia, psychiatry.ubc.ca/person/robert-krell/.

[2] Dr. Krell has lived an eventual and powerful life. In this paper, many focal points and defining moments in his life will be discussed; however, much will also be missed. This should not be viewed as a definitive biography of Dr. Krell–for that, his memoir is much better.

Life

Holland

On August 5, 1940, Robert Krell was born in Holland to Leo and Emily Krell. When he was only two years old, he was sent into hiding away from his parents after they received a letter from German officials instructing them to prepare for “resettlement to the east” (1).[3] His parents became very concerned about this order, as they had heard nothing from friends who had already been resettled, and believed that they were to head towards their inevitable deaths at the hands of the Nazis at a concentration camp such as Auschwitz or Sobibor (1). They brought him to stay with their former neighbors, “Opa”  Hol and Mrs. Mulder, while they planned to go into hiding to avoid Nazi officials who would come looking for them for not following the resettlement order. However, he was soon moved in order to stay with Mrs. Violette (Let) Munnik, who went on to act as his adopted mother. Despite his parents’ original plan for him to be away from them for only a few weeks, it ended up lasting three years, from November 1942 until May 1945, upon Germany’s surrender to the Allies (4). While living with Mrs. Munnik, he was known as Robbie Munnik and was raised Catholic.

In his memoir, Memoiries:[4] Sounds from Silence, Dr. Krell describes that since he left his parents at such a young age, “by war’s end, I had forgotten my parents” (6). He explains that there are discrepancies between the memories of different people–his adopted sister Nora, his mother, and himself–on some specific details regarding his early childhood. There are also some gaps in the exact timeline of that period, because from August to November 1942, there is uncertainty about where he actually was. Despite the surprisingly detailed memories that many survivors maintained of the period, such gaps are inevitable.

By the time the war came to a conclusion, essentially all of his parents’ families had been killed at the hands of the Nazis. Dr. Krell writes of his sadness leaving the Munniks, as he had grown deeply attached to them over the years and knew no other reality. However, in the following years that his family remained in Holland, he would still see the Munniks often, and they would watch him whenever his parents went out of town. To this day, he refers to Mrs. Munnik as his ‘Catholic mother.’ After leaving the Munniks and being reunited with his parents, Dr. Krell spent a few more years in Holland; however, he describes that it was very depressing in the post-war period, as such a huge swath of their family and community had been wiped off the face of the Earth.[5]

[3] Throughout this paper, in-text citations such as this will refer to Dr. Krell’s memoir, Memoiries: Sounds from Silence.

[4] Dr. Krell’s reason for this spelling is because he views the book as a mixture between a memoir and a collection of memories, as he explains in the prologue: “Here are my recollections and childhood fragments filled in by others, then my own, filled in by me.”

[5] S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Dr Robert Krell. YouTube, 14 Mar. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJsD_m6xb4g&ab_channel=S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

Canada

In 1951, the Krell family left Holland and immigrated to Canada by boat. When interviewing Dr. Krell, I asked him why his parents chose Vancouver. He explained:

“I don’t even know how my parents made the decision to come to Canada and actually picked Vancouver. I suspect it is because of a crazy thing I did not know about…my mother actually had two uncles here who arrived sometime in the ‘20s, which was a crazy thing. The one who was very kind had died before we got here. The one who was unkind was here and never established a relationship with us.”[6]

In the early years, Robert was thriving in Canada, but his parents were struggling with the change from European to Canadian life, as well as the recent traumas of the Holocaust. He attended Kitsilano Secondary School, which he described had at the time “2,200 students, and only about a dozen Jews,”[7] and he tried very hard to appear normal amongst other children. He believes that he “became a relatively normal Canadian, despite the intrusion of Holocaust memories. They were inescapable” (46).

Despite travelling thousands of miles to escape antisemitism, the evils of anti-Jewish hatred followed the Krell family to Vancouver. He writes of a time when his family visited West Vancouver with a real estate agent looking to buy a home, but were quickly turned away, being told that Jews and Chinese were not permitted to buy homes there.[8] After graduating from Kitsilano Secondary School, he went on to attend the University of British Columbia for his undergraduate studies, and continued on there for medical school. After graduating from medical school, he moved to Philadelphia for an internship at Philadelphia General Hospital (75). He completed his residency training in Philadelphia and moved to California for a child psychiatry residency at Stanford University. After earning his license to practice in California and British Columbia, and turning down a lucrative offer for a fellowship at Stanford, he moved back to Vancouver (96). Over the next few years, he worked at the Vancouver General Hospital Child Psychiatry In-Patient Unit, took his fellowship exams, and became an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UBC (108-110, 116).

Before his move back to Vancouver, Dr. Krell had planned to take time off for travels, including a portion of time in Israel. While on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv, the plane was taken over by terrorist hijackers associated with the Palestinian terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Describing his initial feelings in the moment, Krell details:

“My first reaction was of rage. My second was of fear. The rage was instant, a primitive response to my having been hidden as a child in Nazi-occupied Holland. As far as I was concerned, the Arabs were about to finish the job that the Germans had failed to complete, my murder.”

Krell, 99

As the hijacking was occurring and passengers were bracing for the likely end of their lives, he heard rumors that the reason for the hijacking was that Yitzhak Rabin[9] was aboard the plane.

This ended up being the rationale; however, the terrorists were mistaken and Rabin was not actually on the flight. The plane landed in the Damascus airport and the passengers were soon released and made their way to Israel. However, two Israeli men and four women were not allowed to leave with the others and were held in Damascus for longer. This incident is now known as the TWA 840 hijacking.

Dr. Krell married Marilyn Davis in 1971, and the Munniks came from Holland to attend the ceremony (118). He recalls that the wedding was sad for his parents, as so many friends and relatives never survived to see it: “For Holocaust survivors, simchas, ‘joyous occasions,’ are always a mixed blessing” (119). With Marilyn he had three daughters: Shoshana, Simone, and Michaela. After the wedding, Dr. Krell was appointed as the Department of Psychiatry’s Director of Postgraduate Education (121).

[6] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[7] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[8] S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Dr Robert Krell. YouTube, 14 Mar. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJsD_m6xb4g&ab_channel=S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

[9] Yitzhak Rabin was then the ambassador of Israel to the U.S. He went on to become the Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977, and again from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.

Work

Psychiatry

Dr. Krell has spent his professional life working as a psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry. At his psychiatric practice, he has worked with many different kinds of individuals and groups–single parent families, divorcing couples, and victims of the traumas of the Holocaust and Japanese concentration camps. In describing how he became known for working with Holocaust survivors, Krell details:

“Why did Holocaust survivors seek me out? They knew that I was a Jewish child psychiatrist from a survivor family, so they were hopeful that I would understand their situations without raising too many questions about their Holocaust backgrounds. They feared that they were not only causing their children’s disturbances but also inflicting their Holocaust suffering on them.”

Krell, 134

The survivors were experiencing great pain for decades after the end of the war. Their wounds were becoming intergenerational trauma which they were passing down to their children. At the time, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) did not yet exist, and as a result, there was not an exact understanding among many psychiatrists concerning how best to treat them. Dr. Krell describes the symptoms that many of these survivors were experiencing as “struggles with depression, uncontrollable nightmares, and frequent expressions of suicidal intent” (135).

Dr. Krell has spent much of his professional psychiatric career researching those who had similar experiences to him–child survivors of the Holocaust. Almost no children survived the concentration camps, meaning that most child survivors of the Holocaust had somehow or another avoided Nazi capture, most often through hiding with non-Jewish families such as the Munniks.[10] Of the Jewish children in Europe at the time, Dr. Krell believes that only 7% were still living by the time of liberation; however, it is impossible to be certain of that statistic. He describes the particular disdain that the Nazis felt for the children, as “they represented a possible Jewish future.”[11] The genocidal goals of the Nazi’s Final Solution was inextricably linked to the eradication of all Jewish children, so that this ‘Jewish future’ could never come to fruition.

The way in which child survivors’ memories of their Holocaust experiences developed is something Dr. Krell has thought about a good deal. During our conversation on the phone, he explained that due to the “circumstances of war,” he has memories beginning “quite clearly at age two and a half,” as opposed to when “everything is normal and going well, [childrens’] memories only start meaningfully around ages five or six.”[12] This phenomenon is backed up by traumatologist Paul Valent, who has noted that “major shocks can leave a precocious imprint on memory,” even in those who are younger than the age at which memory is typically developed.[13] The development of a child’s memory in relation to trauma has long been an area of focus for Dr. Krell throughout his research.

[10] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[11] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[12] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[13] Valent, Paul. “Conclusions.” Child Survivors of the Holocaust, 1st ed., Brunner-Routledge, 1994, pp. 282.

Holocaust Education

In the first few decades after the end of World War II, many Jewish communities lacked the desire to discuss in detail the truths of the tragedies that occurred throughout the Holocaust. Barbara Schober wrote her graduate thesis at UBC in 2001 on the ongoing status of Holocaust commemoration in Vancouver. In it, she wrote that the “fifteen to twenty years following the war were a period during which the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry was almost completely marginalized in Jewish public affairs.”[14] This dilemma is one that Dr. Krell confronted often during his life. Throughout his extensive efforts to increase awareness of the Holocaust, he has fought back against this, resulting in such instances as colleagues telling him that it is a “personal ‘preoccupation’ of which he must overcome” (135). However, he feels as if the only way to move forward from the Holocaust is “not [to] get rid” of it, but to “go through it” and “confront it.”[15] His mechanism for confronting his trauma was “through education,” and to do so, he has been involved in many different endeavors over the years relating to Holocaust education and awareness, both throughout Canada and the United States.

Beginning in the mid 1970s, Dr. Krell and a few other survivors worked to create the Holocaust Education Symposium Committee, which educated local high school students on the Holocaust through lectures and interactive discussions with survivors (145). He eventually decided that a full center must be created in the city to build off the success of the symposia and allow for deeper educational opportunities on the Holocaust (180). This idea eventually became reality with the creation of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, abbreviated as the VHEC. He was involved with bringing Elie Wiesel to Vancouver in 1978 for the Yom Hashoah event and kept in touch with him up until Wiesel’s death in 2016 (159). In addition, Dr. Krell was instrumental in the founding of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Remembrance and Education and helped to prepare for the first world gathering of Holocaust survivors in 1981 in Jerusalem (148). It was in fact at the opening ceremony of this gathering when he first thought of himself under the label of ‘child survivor’ (152).

Prior to the establishment of the VHEC, he was a part of the team that planned and constructed a memorial for the family members of local survivors that perished in the Holocaust, situated in the cemetery of the local Orthodox synagogue, Schara Tzedek. Dr. Krell was disappointed that such a memorial did not previously exist, as the survivors had no gravestones to visit in order to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, for their relatives. In the absence of many living family members, a good deal of survivors became very close with one another. He describes that “survivors became like our family,” connected through the community of the Schara Tzedek synagogue.[16]

Throughout his work, Dr. Krell emphasizes the divide that long existed in the Jewish community between survivors and non-survivors in the decades after the Holocaust, stating that many perceived “survivors [as] really such irritants” (334). The divide is grounded in many Jews’ desires to move on from their traumas and seek prosperous lives in the diaspora. Many Jews feel that it is important to always remember the Holocaust; however, they fear that an over focus on it will have a harmful effect on the future of the Jewish people. Professor Arlene Stein of Rutgers University wrote about this phenomenon in 2014, detailing how some worry that “Holocaust memory may diminish the possibility of joy and celebration” of the current prosperity the Jewish community has achieved in the over half a century since the conclusion of the Holocaust.[17] However, to believe that such a binary exists fails to grasp the importance of the messages behind Dr. Krell’s work. The Holocaust must be understood and remembered so that we can pursue a brighter tomorrow, in order to prevent such atrocities from ever repeating themselves. This mindset permeates throughout the life and work of Dr. Krell. From such work, a truly deep awareness and understanding of the Holocaust has taken hold amongst his community of Vancouver and beyond.

[14] Schober, Barbara. “Holocaust Commemoration in Vancouver, B.C., 1943-1975.” University of British Columbia, 2001, pp. 144.

[15] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[16] Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

[17] Stein, Arlene. “Too Much Memory? Holocaust Fatigue in the Era of the Victim.” Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, 2014, pp. 169.

Conclusion

In the final chapter of Memoiries: Sounds from Silence, Dr. Krell writes that despite having a career that has been so deeply intertwined with the Holocaust, he still has trouble talking about his memories and his experiences during that time. He believes that his “life was scarred irrevocably by the Shoah,” and that confronting it through education is his attempt to “ward off the flames” (143). He has spent a lifetime overcoming his personal and intergenerational trauma, and utilizing that to help others in similar circumstances. Through his expansive career in psychiatry and his multitude of Holocaust-related educational endeavours, Dr. Krell has contributed in deep and lasting ways to the future of the community. The legacy of his work will continue to educate future generations on the evils of the Holocaust and the unique experiences of children being raised in highly traumatic circumstances.

Works Cited

Krell, Robert. Memoiries: Sounds from Silence. Robert Krell, 2016.

Krell, Robert. Personal Interview. 15 March 2021. By Benjamin Stanislawski. Telephone Interview.

“Robert Krell.” UBC Department of Psychiatry, The University of British Columbia, psychiatry.ubc.ca/person/robert-krell/.

Schober, Barbara. “Holocaust Commemoration in Vancouver, B.C., 1943-1975.” University of British Columbia, 2001.

Stein, Arlene. “Too Much Memory? Holocaust Fatigue in the Era of the Victim.” Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, 2014, pp. 167–182.

S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Dr Robert Krell. YouTube, 14 Mar. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJsD_m6xb4g&ab_channel=S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

Valent, Paul. “Conclusions.” Child Survivors of the Holocaust, 1st ed., Brunner-Routledge, 1994, pp. 269–288.