This movie employs short clips from life story interviews with child Holocaust survivors who arrived in Montreal, Quebec, between 1947 and 1952, looking to remake their lives, rebuild their families, and recreate their communities; these interviews are a part of the Montreal Life Stories project. Integration, as interviewees admit, was not seamless. As they struggled to carve spaces for themselves within the established Canadian Jewish community, their difficult wartime stories were neither easily received nor understood. When remembering this period, survivors speak about employment, education, dating, integration into both the pre-war Jewish community and the larger society, and, perhaps most importantly, the creation of their own social worlds within both existing and new frameworks. Forged in a transitional and tumultuous period in Quebec’s history, these social worlds are an important example of survivor agency.
To learn more about these social worlds see Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “‘We Started Over Again, We Were Young’: Postwar Social Worlds of Child Holocaust Survivors in Montreal.” Urban History Review 39, 1 (October 2010).
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