Features
Return to Ukraine: searching out the Rosner family past
Introduction: Not too long ago we were contacted by former CBC Manitoba managing editor Cecil Rosner, who asked us whether we’d be interested in publishing a story about a trip he took in 2012 to visit the area in Ukraine where both his parents were born. Although it’s been 10 years since Cecil visited Ukraine, given the current situation in that country we thought it timely to get a sense of what life was like in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion.
By CECIL ROSNER ““Oi — look at the way the schlemiel drives.”
We are bouncing along the potholed roads of Western Ukraine, heading from Lviv to my mother’s hometown of Buczacz. Our driver and guide isn’t Jewish, but that doesn’t stop him from endlessly whistling Fiddler on the Roof tunes and inserting Yiddishisms into every second phrase.
“These guys are all ganefs (thieves),” he says of the policemen we pass, as he forms his thumb and forefinger into a pistol and slowly pulls the trigger. Alex doesn’t like the speed traps the highway patrols set up, and he appreciates oncoming drivers signalling him to beware of cops just beyond the next hill. It’s an important issue for our driver, who crisscrosses Ukraine’s roads all year-long, ferrying tourists to distant towns and villages in search of their Jewish ancestors.
For Alex, who holds a history degree and is an expert at tracing genealogical roots, it’s an occupation he never dreamed he would have. But in the chaos of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when jobs were evaporating and everyone was trying to reimagine their lives, it seemed like a useful niche to pursue – especially as foreigners were finally trying to discover exactly what had happened to their relatives during the Second World War.
That’s why I’m here too, along with my wife and a cousin. Both of my parents were born in the region, and both were here when the Nazis occupied the area in 1941. In different improbable and miraculous ways, they both survived the war and emigrated to Canada. But every single other family member was shot, gassed, beaten or starved to death by the Nazis and their collaborators. We came here to see what traces of their lives remained.
It seemed logical to make our first stop the local museum, right across from the old city hall. Buczacz is little more than a village, with about 13,000 people. In the early part of the 19th century, Jews made up two-thirds of the population. While that number ebbed and flowed over the years, Jews were still in the majority when the Nazi occupation began. But that would have been difficult to discern in the museum.
In all the display cases, and in the colourful photo album that the town produces, there is no specific mention of a Jewish population. There is scarcely any reference to the Second World War, except for a notation that the town “was released from German invaders and captured by the Soviet Union.” Wouldn’t a town’s museum want to address what became of the majority of the population? What happened to thousands of farmers, shop owners, tailors, tinsmiths, doctors, lawyers and politicians? Doesn’t the mass roundup and extermination of most people in town even rate a mention?
The only hint of any Jewish presence came in the form of artifacts from the life of Shmuel Agnon, a Jewish writer born in Buczacz who won the Nobel Prize for literature. But the entire fate of the people Agnon wrote about had been erased.
Alex had little luck getting the museum’s employee to throw any light on what the town was like in the immediate pre-war period. She genuinely seemed not to know. But there were a few things I already knew.
My mother, Mina, had been born here in 1913, and her family owned a wholesale distribution company. They carbonated water and stored it in big, forty-litre copper cylinders, shipping them along with ice to shops throughout the area. When she was 25, she married my father, Michael Rosner, who came from nearby Kolomaya. In 1939, they opened a small retail store on the main town square, probably within metres of the present-day museum.
When the war broke out in September 1939, there was a reprieve. The region came under the control of the Soviets, and Jews were under no immediate threat. All that changed when Hitler marched eastward in 1941. My father was conscripted by the retreating Soviets, and my mother was trapped behind Nazi lines for the remainder of the war.
For the next three years, every member of my mother’s family – her parents, five brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins – were dragged from their hiding places, bludgeoned or shot, or sent off to be executed. They were all dumped into unmarked graves. My parents’ first-born child – my brother – also fell victim, dying at the age of three in 1942.
My mother’s survival defied any normal odds. She fled from one hiding place to another, escaping just in time to avoid capture. She spent 11 months in the attic of a Polish family along with five other Jews. She took an assumed name and boldly convinced the Nazis she was Christian. Finally, after Buczacz was liberated, she re-united with my father and they came to Canada to start anew in 1948.
I had been to Buczacz once before, with my mother, in 1990. We came with a documentary crew to record her first visit back home since the war. It was an emotional trip and a difficult one for both of us. But we learned very little of the actual events that had transpired in the town, or the exact locations where they happened. That’s why, nearly 15 years after my mother’s death, I was returning for a second time.
I convinced Alex that our best strategy on this trip would be to find older people and ask them what they knew about the 30s and 40s. Alex seemed skeptical. For one thing, the war had begun more than 70 years ago, so it was unlikely there would be any useful first-hand witnesses at hand. And there was also the collective amnesia that pertained to inconvenient truths.
After all, a segment of the population had actively collaborated with Hitler. They were instrumental in helping identify and round up the Jews, the Communists, and all the other elements the Nazis wanted to destroy. Some might still be living in Buczacz and surrounding areas. Their children and grandchildren almost certainly are here.
The museum’s employee finally gives us a sliver of hope. There is someone in town we should visit – someone who knows the history and might be able to help us. His name is Mykola.
We drive for a few minutes and stop at Mykola’s house. I am expecting to find an elderly man who may have been a teenager during the war. Instead, we come upon a 40-something man in sweatpants and a Maple Leafs T-shirt. He is clutching a handful of papers and photographs. One of them shows a photo of Buczacz’s surviving Jews standing beside a memorial gravestone in 1944. Out of the original population of 10,000, no more than 100 survived. One of the people in the photo is my mother.
Mykola has taken an interest in wartime history, and now helps visiting tourists locate family remnants. He has a variety of interesting documents, including a map of pre-war street names, and a mid-19th century register of townsfolk. It turns out that he knows about some of the Jewish families that lived in Buczacz during the war – a handful of them have returned over the years, and he has helped them find their old homes and landmarks.
We ask Mykola if he could help solve a puzzle my mother and I couldn’t figure out on our previous trip. Her family had lived on a street called Zeblickevicie, which had changed names several times after the war. From her description, though, we knew it was beside a stream that ran into the Strypa River, a subsidiary of the Dniester.
We pile into the car along with Mykola and he directs us to the location. The stream had been covered over, except at the point where it emptied into the Strypa. Though the original home was no longer there, he shows us the exact location where my mother’s family had lived. I saw the idyllic surroundings, the lush vegetation around the quiet river, and for the first time I had an inkling of the peaceful life my mother experienced before the war changed everything.
While we were all walking along the old Zeblickevicie street, Mykola bumps into a friend and exchanges a few words with him. As we walk on, the friend stops my wife, Harriet, and our cousin Nina and says: “Mina Rosner – I am a Witness.” That is the name of my mother’s book. Alex is impatient. He had rich experience of locals trying to pester visitors, and he was eager to move us all along. But Harriet and Nina persist. It turns out the man on our chance encounter knows all about my mother’s story, and offers to take us on a tour of where she lived, where she went to school, where she hid during the war, and where her family members were killed.
Over the next 24 hours, Alex grudgingly admits he was wrong. Our serendipitous encounter has linked us up with Jura, a 60-year-old retired computer technician, astrologist and local historian. He knows my mother’s exact birthdate, and, it appears, everyone else’s in town. He has a photocopied version of my mother’s book, and he has pieced together her recollections with precise locations of many of the events she describes. If photographic memories actually exist, we figure he has one. He is a visiting tourist’s dream come true, and Alex has to take a back seat while Jura takes us on a remarkable tour of my mother’s life.
The first stop is just around the corner, on a street that used to be called Chechego Maya. I remember it from my mother’s stories, but we could never pinpoint it on our previous trip. Jura shows us the building where my mother’s sister and her husband ran a hardware shop. He knows the address because it’s listed in trade publications of the era. Though my mother’s original house and her parents’ store no longer existed, I finally had an authentic touchstone of some of her family’s life at the time.
Jura takes us to the pre-war building on Kolejowa Street that served as the cheder, the religious school, where Jewish kids studied. We visit the girls’ school and middle school where my mother was a student, and walk into Buczacz’s Sokol theatre, where she watched dramatic performances and movies as a teenager. A group of children is rehearsing a musical concert on stage, and I can imagine my mother sitting in the auditorium with her brothers and sisters and friends.
Just down the road, near an orchard, Jura shows us the garden of a long-ago demolished home where my mother hid during one of the Nazi aktions, or periodic killing sprees. A bunker had been constructed in the cellar, and this helped shield her and other Jews from capture. The Nazis conducted four major aktions during their occupation of Buczacz before declaring the town Judenrein, or completely free of Jews. But the declaration turned out to be false. My mother, along with dozens of others, managed to survive with the aid of courageous gentile families who risked their safety to shelter them.
In the middle of our travels, Jura pulls out a sheet of typewritten names – people who had served as policemen, gendarmes and SS officers during the war. I recognize some of the names. Some of the Nazi war criminals and their collaborators have been brought to justice, but the vast majority remain undetected and untried for their crimes.
We go to the Jewish cemetery, where many of the town’s Jews – including my mother’s parents – were taken to be executed. The place is untended and overgrown, a jumble of brush and junk, with headstones in various states of disrepair. We find my great-grandmother’s grave. It’s significant, because two plots over my mother buried her first-born child, Isaac, in an unmarked plot. I clear away the branches and debris from the group of headstones in the area to get a better view. I bend down and touch the ground where the brother I never met is buried. Exactly 70 years later, someone has come back to this place to remember.
Jura takes me down a path through brambles to a spot where survivors had erected a memorial to the war’s victims. The place is overgrown with trees and bushes now, but he says there was nothing here before the war. The marker no longer survives, and even if it did, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to find it without an expert guide.
Our next stop is Fedor Hill, another killing ground where thousands perished. It’s difficult to see traces of anything here, but Jura once again guides us to a marker commemorating the killing of 450 people during the early days of slaughter in 1941. It had been erected by a survivor’s family well after the war.
A far more prominent memorial on Fedor Hill is dedicated to the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the military wing of a movement that initially collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of winning an independent homeland. In fact, throughout our travels in Western Ukraine, there were numerous new memorials to Ukrainian nationalist fighters in places where it might have been logical to place markers noting the victims of the Nazi era. We saw this on the side of a synagogue in Ivano-Frankivsk, near the Jewish ghetto entrance in Lvov, and many other places. In my father’s hometown of Kolomyia, it was a similar story — no mention of Jews or Nazi victims in the local museum, no remnants of the huge Jewish population, and a patriotic memorial to Ukrainian nationalist figures on the site of a former synagogue. In the re-written history of today, the UPA and its related Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists are presented as groups that fought both Soviets and Nazis; no mention is made of the collaboration in 1941 that led to so much destruction during the war.
Throughout our trip to Ukraine, we were reminded of the upcoming election campaign and the ever-present imagery of Ukrainian nationalism, especially in the Western part of the country. In a land that was exercising its brand of democratic activity, we had to wonder how thoroughly the country had come to grips with its recent history. Many countries are wrestling with related questions, trying to reconcile horrendous events of the past with a way forward. But as in any process or truth and reconciliation, there needs to be an initial recognition of what took place. Erasing and denying the past is rarely the path to building a healthy future.
At the end of our tour in Buczacz, Jura wanted to know the exact date of my mother’s death. He also was interested in our birthdates and any other information he could glean from us. In a country that chooses to forget so much, he was something of an anomaly.
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Features
Israel pavilion ambassadors – then and now
By BERNIE BELLAN Given that Folklorama is on again and the Israel pavilion – Shalom Square, is in full swing, I thought it timely to resurrect an article I first posted to this website in August 2023.
But before reading that article, I wanted you to see who this year’s ambassadors are for Shalom Square:
It was back in 2023, however, that I set out to answer a question that I had asked our readers to help answer: Where was the very first Israel pavilion located? Some readers had thought it was the Golden Age Club, which used to be located on Pritchard and Salter. But others weren’t so sure. Here then is what I wrote back in August 2023 – when, with the help of a librarian at the Winnipeg Public Library, I was able to solve the riddle of where the first Israel pavilion was located:
It was earlier in August 2023 that I had raised a number of questions about the history of the Israel pavilion at Folklorama.
Among those questions were: Where was the first Israel pavilion located and when did the Israel pavilion actually become a permanent fixture in the YMHA on Hargrave (before moving to its current home in the Asper Campus)?
As part of my search for answers to those questions I turned to David Cohen, who had long been the coordinator of the Israel pavilion when it was located on Hargrave, but who didn’t step into that role until 1975.
David thought that the Israel pavilion hadn’t moved to Hargrave until 1974, but he wasn’t sure where the first Israel pavilion had been located.
I tried to find information using the Winnipeg Public Library online digital archive. In case you didn’t know, anyone with a library card can access the library’s online archive. You can also have access to newspaperarchive.com through the library’s digital archive. Newspaperarchive.com is an invaluable reference tool for journalists especially – or anyone wanting to access old newspaper archives, for that matter, but ordinarily you would need a subscription to newspaperarchive.com in order to use it. For some reason, however, the search function in the Winnipeg Public Library’s digital search engine didn’t produce results when I entered the word “Folklorama.”
As a result I called the Winnipeg Public Library for assistance and received great help from someone by the name of Louis-Phillipe. After taking my information, Louis-Phillipe phoned me to say that he had found out that the library had compiled a file of press clippings related to Folklorama going back to the very first year, 1970.
Further, Louis-Phillipe said, he had found a list of the 22 pavilions in that first year of Folklorama, along with where they were located. It turns out that the Israel pavilion was actually located in two different venues that first year: the Rosh Pina and the Shaarey Zedek.
The next day I also heard from reader Phyllis Dana, who confirmed that the Israel Pavilion had been in both synagogues. Phyllis also remembered that the only food served that first year was honey cake.
But the pièce de resistance came when I heard from reader Marilyn Breitman (née Stitz), who now lives in Calgary, when she phoned me on Monday, August 21 (which is when she received the August 16 issue of the paper with my story about Folklorama).
Marilyn told me that, not only did she remember that the first Israel pavilion alternated between the Rosh Pina and the Shaarey Zedek, she had actually been the female representative of the Israel pavilion that first year. Her title, Marilyn said, was simply “Jewish.”
But, as you might also recall, the entire confusion over where the first Israel pavilion was located began with an email I had received from Roz Greenfeld, who had written to correct my mistake when I had written in the August 2 issue that the Israel pavilion had been located in the YMHA from the very beginning.
Roz pointed out that, in 1971, the second year of Folklorama, the Israel pavilion was located in “Council House” or, as it was better known, “The Golden Age Club,” on Pritchard and Salter. How did she remember that? Roz was the female representative of the pavilion that year. Her title, as I found out was “Miss Judea,” she said.
So, if the Israel pavilion was located at both the Rosh Pina and Shaarey Zedek in that first year of Folkorama, and in the Golden Age Club that second year, where was it after that?
It was left to Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada archivist Andrew Morrison to come up with the answer to that question. Andrew informed me that the Israel pavilion did indeed move to the YMHA in 1972 and remained there for the next 25 years, until it moved to the Asper Campus in 1997.
There was a further footnote to the story, which is when I decided to try my luck with the Winnipeg Public Library’s online archive one more time. This time, rather than searching for “Folklorama,” I tried searching for old copies of both the Free Press and the Tribune from August 1970. I did manage to get results for the Tribune and when I entered a specific search within the Tribune I found a picture of all the famale representatives of pavilions – in bathing suits.
It turned out – and this was corroborated by both Marilyn Breitman and Roz Greenfeld, the female representatives had to parade in unison – in bathing suits, as part of Folklorama festivities. Each year, as well, a queen of Folklorama was chosen. Neither Marilyn nor Roz was made queen, both of them told me, although Roz was voted “Miss Congeniality.”
In addition to finding out about the early days of the Israel pavilion, I also learned that the Chai dancers were not regular performers at the Israel pavilion in those early years – as they eventually did become. Chai performers would dance only one night in those first years, with other entertainment the other nights.
I did enlist Andrew Morrison’s help once again and did find that Chai performed only one evening during the first few years of Folklorama – from 1970 to 1976. In 1977 Chai began performing every night of Folklorama, but there were other performers on hand as well, including Jerry Maslowsky and Rabbi Yosel Rosenzweig. In 1978 the Chai Folk Ensemble was the featured entertainment every evening; however, a notice that appeared in our paper did say that whistler Harvey Pollock would “be on hand” to entertain – whatever that meant.
While some may wonder of what earth shaking importance all this is, I ask: Isn’t it fun to look back in time – for just a little while, instead of worrying about more immediate problems, such as global warming, inflation, terrorist attacks in Israel, and whether Donald Trump will be president while he’s in jail?
Features
EINSTEIN, RITA AND ME
By DAVID R. TOPPER In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate student majoring in Physics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh – there was only one girl in my advanced physics classes. As I learned later, nothing much had changed since the days of Einstein. When he was studying Physics at the Polytechnic in Zurich, the physics classes were all male – except for Mileva Marić, a Serbian who was the first girl in high school ever to take a physics course in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. Because Switzerland was the only place where women were admitted to university classes, she was there with Albert in Zurich.
She was very smart, especially in math, and also proficient at the piano. Born with a dislocated hip, Mileva had a slight limp, and the men in the class ignored her – except for one, Albert. They became a couple and eventually married.
Back to me in my university physics classes – where it seems that little had changed for over sixty years. In my advanced classes there was only one girl. Her name was Rita. She mainly stayed to herself. Majoring in Mathematics, she took all the advanced physics courses available, right through the fourth year. In short, in those predominantly male classes, she was an anomaly – alone and ignored by her classmates.
Except me. No, I didn’t date her, yet I didn’t ignore her. During those undergraduate years, I lived at home and took a bus or a trolley to school five days a week, leaving early in the morning. The university is in downtown Pittsburgh. Walking to the campus, I first went to the Physics Department, using it as my base. From there I went to my other classes during the day. There was a small classroom in the Department that was almost always empty, especially in the morning. It could be used for individual studying or small group discussions and such. In the early morning, I was usually the only one there – except for Rita, who used it for studying, too. She often was there, even before me. Usually the conversation started by me saying something like: “Hi Rita, did you get the last problem in mechanics class homework?” Her response was invariably, “Yes.” We would go over it, with her finding my mistakes. We had an amiable relationship that never went beyond our interactions about physics – right up to the end of our university years. As far as I can remember, I don’t think I knew much about her beyond the classroom.
But one event, which I’ll never forget, stands out. It was during our last year of classes in a course on the theory of relativity. For the textbook the prof used a paperback edition of the original papers on the theory. Early in the course, we went through Einstein’s first paper of 1905 – step by step. On this particular day, the prof came in and said he had a problem with the next step in the paper. As we all sat with our books in front of us, he pointed to a certain equation where we ended in the previous class. In the next sentence, Einstein says that such and such follows. The problem for the prof was that he didn’t know how Einstein got that deduction. I looked at it, and didn’t have a clue either.
Just then, Rita’s hand went up. She said she thinks she knows how Einstein got it. The prof asked her to come up to the blackboard and show him. Rita did, and the prof said that she was right. I’m quite sure that – then and there – Rita got an A in that course, if not an A+.
That gives you some idea about Rita and my relationship with her at the time. Not a very significant part of my 4-year undergraduate years – except for this one event in a physics course.
Why then am I bringing this up now, so many years later? Here’s why.
I graduated with my BS degree in the fall of 1964. I then went to graduate school at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, majoring in Physics. (It’s now Case-Western Reserve University.)
When I moved there, I lived in a formerly swanky hotel on the edge of the campus, which was purchased by the university as a residence solely for graduate students. They called it The Graduate House. Eleven floors, the top 8 with suites for students, with one floor solely for female students. It was a radical experiment in co-ed living for the time.
My first day there, after getting my room and putting my things in drawers and so forth, it was late in the afternoon – and I was hungry. I had been told when I registered that the dining hall would open the following morning, but for now there was no food. However, on the third floor there were vending machines with sandwiches and such, so I went to find them.
Going down the elevator, exiting at the third floor, and walking down a hall – suddenly I heard my name called. “David, what are you doing here?” Turning around – there was Rita! It was quite a surprise for both of us. This tells you how minimally we interacted before; not even knowing that we both were going to the same graduate school.
I told her that I was majoring in Physics at Case. She, of course, was majoring in Math. After a chat about all this, I said that I was looking for the sandwich machines. She said that there was a diner nearby, and she was going there for dinner with someone else she had just met so I went, too. Thus, Rita and I reunited in Cleveland, now living in the same building.
In a short while, I made friends with a group of people in the Graduate House with diverse majors. Some were in various sciences, others in humanities. It was a lively group, with animated discussions on a range of academic topics, including politics, especially as the Vietnam War became the center of the news in the USA.
Rita was not a part of that group, but I did often see her. Being the eager student that I was, I was up early, getting to the university to study in the library before classes started. Coming to the dining room for breakfast, not long after it opened, I often saw Rita, too – all alone in a far corner. I took my tray and we had breakfast together. Except for that morning ritual, I seldom had any interactions with her.
Thinking about this now, I find the parallel morning rituals (first in Pittsburgh and then in Cleveland) a fascinating serendipitous episode in my life. The difference was that in Cleveland, we were not taking the same courses so we didn’t have to compare solutions to homework. We did talk about our respective courses, and interestingly a parallel appeared. By around mid-term of that first year in graduate school, we both were less than enthusiastic about what we were learning and, accordingly, were both thinking of not carrying on in our respective subjects.
For me it was Quantum Mechanics and the impossibility for us to know reality in itself. Everything was statistical, uncertain and almost esoteric. I found the uncritical attitude toward this world-view to be almost religious in nature. (I only learned later that Einstein felt the same way!)
For Rita, it was the same, despite the different fields. The math now was far beyond basic geometry, algebra and calculus. Topology, Group Theory, Galois’ Theory, and more – all culminating in Gödel’s Theorem, which asserts that all mathematical knowledge is inherently incomplete. It all was too esoteric for her. She knew that she was not going to get a PhD in mathematics.
We commiserated together, with another parallel in our unusual relationship, but with a difference. I still wanted to get my Master’s Degree and somehow still go on to get a job as a professor – that had been my goal in life ever since my first semester at Duquesne. Rita, however, was thinking of dropping out immediately and leaving university life altogether.
For me, this problem was resolved in my second year of Physics at Case, when I took a course taught by Martin Klein. Although he was a physicist in the Department, for many years he no longer was doing research in it. Instead, he was writing papers on the history of the subject – mainly involving Einstein, Boltzmann, Gibbs, Ehrenfest and others. Today those papers are paragons in the field. It was my extremely good luck that the department permitted him to teach such material for the first time.
I loved the course. I was enthralled by the topics – this was the way I wanted to learn physics, through its history. After getting my Master’s in Physics at the end of that year, I moved across campus to the History of Science Department. In another four years I had a PhD in the subject.
Back to early 1965: I tried to talk Rita out of dropping out, but she was adamant. The kicker was this: she really preferred numbers with $$$$ in front of them. Yes, she wanted to be an accountant. She didn’t want to waste any more time here, when she could be home getting her accounting credentials. As I recall, sometime before the spring of that year she went back to Pittsburgh. I’m sure she had an easy time getting her accounting licence and all that went with it. As she was very smart. My guess is that she was an excellent accountant and was very successful in that career.
I have no way of knowing. We didn’t keep in touch (honestly, I don’t know why not) and I can’t even remember her last name. All that I can recall is what I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I find these two interactions between Rita and me an interesting and pleasing tidbit about life and relationships – so much so that I deem it worthy of repeating here.
David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific, Academy of the Heart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag. and elsewhere.
His poem Seascape with Gulls: My Father’s Last Painting won first prize in the annual poetry contest of CommuterLit Mag – May 12, 2025.
