I am looking at a picture. My wife and I are sitting on a blanket of leaves in a local park, surrounded by our grandchildren, our future. It is a bright autumn afternoon, the kind of day that makes you grateful for small things, the sound of laughter, the crunch of leaves, the warmth of sunlight filtering through the trees. Canada is not a perfect country, but it has given me so much.

There is another picture. It shows a family sitting on the grass, perhaps after a picnic. They are serious, as people often were when taking photographs in the 1930s. But on that afternoon, in that moment, those eight people, my father’s family, might have thought, Poland is not a perfect country, but it has given us so much.

I have shared that photograph in classrooms and workshops over the years. It is the only picture I have of my father’s family, all of them murdered in the Treblinka death camp on November 2, 1943. Only my father, Max, survived.

The two pictures are different, yet the same.

In that earlier photograph, I see the quiet strength........

© Canadian Jewish News