Finding Edith

Holocaust survivor Edith Gelbard is no longer in hiding; in fact, she now allows herself to be put in the limelight in order to share her remarkable story. The 76 year old is the heroine of Kathy Kaser’s new novel Hiding Edith, which narrates Gelbard's life as a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust.

Elementary school students throughout Canada and the world have read Hiding Edith, including the Grade 6 class at Windsor Forks District School. Students there fell in love with the story, and April 11 they fell in love with Gelbard.

Gelbard journeyed from her home in Toronto last week to address some 240 students at the school, including a class from Wolfville Jr. High. Since reading Hiding Edith last winter the Grade 6 classes had been corresponding with Gelbard, so much so that she said they had become, “very close to her heart.”

Gelbard visited the school that day with a purpose in mind, to tell the story with her own voice and to meet face to face those students who had reached out to her.

“I feel at home here, like I already know everyone so well,” she said. “These 27 children wrote the most beautiful letters.”

Although Gelbard's childhood dramatically differed from their own, students were eager to try and understand her harrowing experience. One common denominator was the subject of bullying, something Gelbard understood on a grand scale.

“I understand bullying. Nobody wanted the Jewish around,” she said. “Seventy years later and it still hurts me. If you do that to anyone for years and years it will stay with them. Do not do it.”

No disguising atrocities

Although Hiding Edith was written for the upper elementary age group, there was no disguising the atrocities Gelbard’s family and friends faced during the Holocaust.

Gelbard told students that millions of Jews were killed in concentration camps; more than one million of those were babies and children like themselves. “Being taken away on a truck by men with rifles, that is very hard.

“I didn't know where my mother or father were. There was no one to take care of us,” she said. Gelbard admitted it was difficult to retell all of her experiences. “You can't give them all the details. That is too much.”

For a few years, both Edith and her younger brother Gaston lived at a private school in Mossiac run by Jewish Scouts. There, Edith was able to form bonds of friendship and trust in the small Catholic village, which had collectively conspired to protect and hide Jewish children.

Although challenging to recall the horrors of the Holocaust to young ears, it is a story that needs to be told, said Grade 6 teacher Melissa Fox. “There are fewer and fewer holocaust survivors left and we need to pass the story on so the next generation can tell it.” Fox read the book last summer, devouring it in less than two days. Sharing Hiding Edith with her students was something Fox felt was essential to their education. “It's important that they know and understand.”

Gelbard’s early years were a blur of nightmares she had never spoke of until the floodgates opened seven years ago.

Even surprised son

She had volunteered to speak about the holocaust at her grandson’s school -- surprising even her own son with the narrative.

“I didn't know her history,” said Daniel Gelbard. “I knew she lived in Vienna and ended up in France, but I didn't' know about the hiding parts, the running parts. To me she was always just ‘Mom.’”

He said the book produced much more than a touching story, for him it has filled in the gaps and provided a family legacy.

Daniel and wife Sandra travelled to Windsor with Gelbard and were amazed by the response from students. “Somehow they can relate to her and think about their own lives in comparison,” he said. “They’re just totally infatuated.

“I'm very, very proud now because we didn’t have to go through that, we didn't have to be scared,” said Grade 6 student Carly Peart. The class agreed they are happy not to experience the fear Gelbard lived. “It's pretty good that she came and told us about her experience,” said Nathan Sherman. “Now we know what other people went through.”

Gelbard was born in Vienna in July of 1932. She had one older sister and younger brother who went on to become a renowned Canadian chef. Her mother passed away from tuberculosis many years after the war. She has four children and nine grandchildren, “we have done well after all,” she said.

Much of Gelbard’s extended family was executed during a Nazi round up in 1938, when she was just over five years old. She was spared when her father, a professional soccer player at the time, was able smuggle her out of Vienna on his shoulders. He was eventually arrested and later died just one day after being released from a Nazi concentration camp.