These essays and articles were written for an in-class assignment on Survivors of the Holocaust @UBC – Life & Work. The objective was to compile the life and works of these survivors who are associated with UBC. The research paper focuses on their life before and after the Holocaust, their legacy, and discusses their writings and memoirs.
The essays are inter-disciplinary and combine historical and literary analysis. They refer to relevant readings and documentaries that we read and watched during the course.
Survivors of the Holocaust have been members of the Faculty at UBC until the present day. The most well-known among them was Prof. Rudolf Vrba, a distinguished medical researcher and Professor of Pharmacology who joined UBC in 1967.
Other survivors who were Faculty members at UBC are:
- Prof Marta Salcudean, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp was the first woman to head the Department of Engineering at UBC. Prof Peter Suedfeld, who now holds Emeritus status, joined UBC as Head of the Department of Psychology in 1972. Robert Krell, Prof Emeritus of Psychiatry survived the Holocaust in hiding in Holland and established the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center (VHEC) in 1994. Dr. Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Faculty in the Dept. of Education is a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.
- Iza Fiszhaut Laponce (née Gustawa Stak) born in 1938 in Poland was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto prior to its destruction, and survived in hiding with false papers. Laponce worked as a librarian in the Humanities and Social Science Reference Division at UBC.
- Gina Dimant worked in the Finance Department of the University of British Columbia from 1973 to retirement. Dimant was a co-founding member of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada.
Thank You
I wish to thank the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center (VHEC) for allowing us to use their collections and digital archives for research purposes. My special thanks to the students from GERM 426 who agreed to share their research and Shyla Seller, archivist at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) for making unpublished materials available to us for research purposes. I also wish to thank the UBC Library for making available the material required for the course on Library Course Online Reserves (LOCR). Thanks to Keith Bunnell, Reference and Collections Librarian, Humanities & Social Sciences Division at Koerner Library for his support.
