By Louise Rachlis
In 1944-45, Ottawa resident Vera Gara and her parents, like many other Hungarian Jews, were rounded up by the Nazis, deported to a forestry work camp in Austria, and then taken to Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where her father died.
Now Vera has written a memoir, Least-expected Heroes of the Holocaust. It’s about her experiences as a girl in Austria and Hungary during the period of Nazi domination of Europe in which 6,000,000 Jews died, and some of the people who tried to help.
“The only reason I’m doing this is that these heroic people have to be acknowledged,” says Vera, her brown eyes flashing. “They could have shot them right then and there.”
In her book she mentions Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg whose heroic actions helped to save Hungarian Jews. In recognition of her work bringing Ottawa’s Raoul Wallenberg Park into being, she was awarded the Swedish Order of the Polar Star in 2004.
“Since then, thinking about my wartime experiences and Wallenberg’s heroic deeds, I became convinced that I must do something to honour the people who were not ambassadors or of other high rank,” she writes, “but who tried to help me and my parents during our awful journey in 1944–45. People in ordinary walks of life showed themselves to be extraordinary by taking risks and acting like decent human beings during those dark days. They are just as important as the heroes we read about in the history books. I cannot honour them all with parks and monuments, though I would if I could. Instead, I have written about some whose lives touched mine, to convey my gratitude.
Today, Vera still lives with her husband George in their home on Island Park Drive where they’ve been since 1975. They have two daughters, Susan and Judith, and three grandchildren, Daniel, Mara and Rebecca. Vera, 78, is a former nurse, and George, 79, was an engineer at Northern Electric, later NorTel Networks.
Twice a week for the past 30 years Vera has been a volunteer at the Civic Campus of the Ottawa Hospital.
In another book, by Ruth Latta published in 1993, The Memory of All That: Canadian Women Remember World War II, Vera was the only Jew and the only survivor included. In arranging the stories for that book, Ruth Latta started with the least horrific wartime experience and ended with what she felt was the most horrific.
“The last one,” Ruth says, “was Vera’s story.”
Decades later, Latta was honoured to play a role in “getting an important story on paper and into book form.”
At first she thought Vera should have chosen someone Jewish to help her tell her story. “I am not Jewish so she had to explain a great many aspects of her religion to me,” says Latta. “But, since her intended audience includes people from all religious and cultural backgrounds, she knew she would have to explain, so my lack of knowledge was actually an asset.”
For years, Vera’s relatives had listened to her stories and told her, “You have to write them down.”
And so she has, with the purpose of paying tribute to the ordinary people who tried to help her and her family. These “unexpected heroes” include Josef and Theresia Lagler, now deceased, and their daughter Maria (Mitzl), an Austrian farm family in Loitzendorf near the forestry camp, with whom she is still friends and speaks to regularly. Mitzl’s daughter Margit is planning to come to Ottawa for her book launch.
“Today at 79, Mitzl is still milking the cows morning and evening, and feeding the animals,” says Vera, who speaks Hungarian, German and English.
As Vera writes in her book:
Life on a farm requires an appreciation of the natural world, and a lot of hard work. The Laglers have struggled for many years to make a living on the land and I think that created in them sympathy for others struggling to survive. It was probably second nature for Mitzl and her family to help us back in 1944.
When I thanked her again for what she, her mother, and grandmother did for us, she said, “Oh, we just did what anybody else would have done.”
I said, “Pardon me, but not everybody else would have. Not everybody was decent back then. At age 12, maybe you didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t. But I know that most people would just have gone along with the crowd.”
Vera’s positive outlook has touched many who have read advanced copies of her book. “This book blew me away with the beauty of the soul of its writer,” says Sherrill Wark of Crowe Creations who designed the book.
Part of the book chronicles Vera’s efforts over the past 30 years, going from school to school across the region to talk about her experiences. She prefers the higher grades, because their questions and better understanding. “I don’t want to scare them.”
She has had thousands of questions from hundreds of schools, including Carambeck Public School in Carleton Place where she has gone for the past 10 years.
Questions like that of a grade seven boy who asked her “what kind of facilities did you use in the cattle car when you had to go?”
She answered, “We took our little bit of food out of our bowls and used the bowls.”
On another occasion, one of the high school girls gave her a candy; “I wanted you to have something sweet.”
“I’m not emotional in the class,” says Vera. “I feel the kids don’t need more than they can take. When I go in and look at the group, I can make up my mind what I should tell them.”
In the ghetto in Szeged, Hungary, in 1944, there were 17 people in three rooms; women, men and families, she says. “It is very difficult for the kids here to understand when now we have separate bathrooms and bedrooms for everyone. They can’t imagine it, rightly so.”
There were 4,000 Jews in her town, and less than half of them came back. “In the small cities, nobody came back.”
To purchase a copy of the book, which is $15, you can e-mail Vera at vgara33@gmail.com.
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