Release of new Azrieli Memoir, “A Mother to My Mother,” by Vancouver-based Holocaust survivor
Malka Pischanitskaya artfully depicts a thriving pre-war Ukrainian Jewish community, and details mass executions by gunfire that took place in the region.
In alignment with British Columbia’s commitment to combat antisemitism through mandatory Holocaust education, high school students now have additional documentary evidence to further their understanding of the events of World War II. A new first-person memoir, A Mother to My Mother, by Vancouver resident Malka Pischanitskaya, was released at an event on June 2nd where the 93-year-old author was in attendance.
The memoir illuminates a lost Jewish society that once thrived in Ukrainian shtetls, or small villages, before the Nazi invasion in 1941, and details mass executions by gunfire that took place in the region. The author, who was 10 years old at the time, survived alongside her mother on sheer will and wits alone. The event featured a projection of related tableau paintings conceptualized by Pischanitskaya and actualized by the visual artists she commissioned to commit them to memory.
Since arriving in Canada in 1975, Pischanitskaya has been a proponent of education as a means of ending human suffering. With antisemitism and Holocaust misinformation on the rise in Canada, her message is a timely one.
British Columbia Premier David Eby has said, in relation to the province’s plans for mandatory Holocaust education for Grade 10 students to be rolled out in the 2025/26 school year, that, “combatting hate begins with learning from the darkest parts of our history, so that the same horrors are never repeated.”
The work of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) serves to preserve each survivor story as eyewitness accounts to the undeniable crimes committed by the Nazis. “As a Holocaust educator, I am acutely aware that each survivor account, like Malka’s, is unique, offering an invaluable illumination of events that defy imagination and providing a tangible, human entry-point into history,” says Nina Krieger, Executive Director of the VHEC and the co-organizer of the June 2nd event.
A Mother to my Mother is published by the Azrieli Foundation through its Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. The Foundation makes their catalogue of 127 memoirs available for free to educational institutions in Canada to teach current and future generations about the Holocaust.
“With half of Canada’s provinces choosing to include more Holocaust education in their curricula, it is more important than ever for our memoirs and classroom resources to support teachers,” says Jody Spiegel, Director of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.
