Features
Yvonne Singer, a Toronto artist who was saved by Wallenberg as an infant, is still on a voyage of self-discovery
By RON CSILLAG
As an artist herself, Yvonne Singer can well appreciate the esthetic merits of the open-air monument to Swedish Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg that was unveiled over the summer at Churchill Park in Hamilton, Ont.
Though she had not, as of this writing, personally viewed the installation, dubbed “Be:longings,” Singer spoke admiringly of the 10 bronze-cast suitcases dispersed along a gravel path adjacent to the Hamilton aviary. She knows Simon Frank, one of the project’s three creators, and is aware that suitcases have been a potent symbol of the Holocaust.
“I like the fact that the suitcases are scattered,” Singer, a well-established visual artist and teacher in Toronto, said in an interview over lemon tea in her sun-drenched kitchen. “I think the imagery and symbolism are very effective in conveying the idea of displacement and emigration.” The old-timey valises evoke not just Wallenberg, Singer noted, but all victims and survivors of that terror-stricken era.
The outdoor project is also “minimal, which I like. I don’t like public sculptures that scream at you or are clichéd.”
Singer connects to the installation on a whole other level. The 78-year-old resident of Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood is Wallenberg’s goddaughter. She was born on his bed.
It’s a Hollywood-worthy tale that evolved over time, in a series of eye-popping twists, turns and coincidences—all amid Singer’s own personal voyage of self-discovery.
The backstory is its own blockbuster: The non-Jewish scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial and banking family, Wallenberg, then just 32, was recruited by the U.S. War Refugee Board and dispatched to Budapest to assist and rescue as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied Hungarian capital as possible. He arrived in July 1944, just as the Nazis had shipped some 440,000 Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. They now set their sights on the Jews of Budapest.
Accorded diplomatic status, Wallenberg famously set off on a frenetic pace. He designed, printed and distributed thousands of the famous “Schutzpass”—an official-looking document that placed the holder under the protection of the neutral Swedish Crown. He also scoured the city for buildings to rent, finding 32, and crammed in as many souls as possible. The “safe houses” flew the yellow-and-blue Swedish flag and were declared protected by diplomatic immunity.
Known for his bluster and bravado, his greatest coup came when he persuaded Nazi commanders to call off the liquidation of Budapest’s Jewish ghetto, with its 70,000 inhabitants. The number of Jews Wallenberg is said to have rescued peaks at 100,000. In any event, he is credited with saving more Jewish lives during the war than any single government.
By January 1945, the Red Army was laying siege to Budapest, and Wallenberg was taken into custody, supposedly on suspicion of being a U.S. spy. He promptly vanished into the gulag. A Soviet report in 1956 stated he had died in July 1947 of a heart attack in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, but supposed eyewitness sightings and stories of contact with him from former inmates continued well into the 1970s.
In 2012, the diaries of a former head of the KGB, discovered in the walls of his Moscow home, stated there was “no doubt” that Wallenberg was “liquidated” in 1947.
But back to Singer.
On the night of Nov. 3, 1944, a desperate Tibor Vandor, who worked for Wallenberg as a courier and liaison to the underground, needed help for his wife, Agnes. She was in labour and had been turned away from Budapest’s hospitals, which barred Jews. Wallenberg allowed the couple to use his own room, while he slept in the corridor.
The next morning, he was called in to see a newborn girl. Asked by the grateful parents to name her, Wallenberg chose Nina Maria Ava (Nina was his half-sister’s name, Maria his mother’s). The couple changed the first name to Yvonne, and Wallenberg agreed to be the child’s godfather.
Singer knew nothing of this until she was 34 years old.
It was October 1979 when she read an article, reprinted from a U.S. newspaper, in the Toronto Star about Wallenberg’s plight. The story included a reference to Singer’s unusual birth taken from a Hungarian book on the Swedish hero written after the war. The baby with the Toronto connection, the parents, the godfather—were all there, mentioned by name.
When she read the piece, “I burst out crying,” she told the Star after contacting the paper. Her story spilled forth a week later in a large Saturday Star article headlined “Swedish hero saved my life: Metro woman.”
Singer is still struck by “the incredible coincidence of it all. Here I am in Toronto in 1979, reading the paper… it boggles the mind. I could have easily gone through life not knowing the story. Suddenly, I had a connection to this man, who sounds like he was fascinating.”
Her parents had not told her the story. And there was another missing piece of the puzzle: their Jewishness.
At war’s end, the Vandors went to Switzerland and Holland before settling in Montreal in 1949, where the parents shed their Jewish identities, doubtless seeking to forget. Tibor Vandor even became an elder in the United Church.
“I always pressed them for more information, and they always refused,” even following the revelations in the Toronto Star, Singer recalled. “They told me very, very little.” Her parents never revealed being Jews. Their silence encompassed “anything to do with the war. They were just not forthcoming.”
Singer graduated from McGill University and went on to teach English and French at local high schools. She converted to Judaism to marry her husband, Ron Singer, a theatre director and educator, in 1966. A few years later, a cousin in England recalled being a flower-girl at Yvonne’s parents’ wedding, which she said took place in a synagogue. The parents denied it but their daughter believed it.
Singer’s feelings of alienation as an immigrant child would evaporate on discovering that she had been born Jewish, whether the knowledge came from a cousin or the Toronto Star. “I felt like I’d come home, part of a history that goes back thousands of years. I no longer felt rootless.”
The Singers moved to Toronto in 1971, where Yvonne later began a prolific art career in various media and teaching visual arts at York University. Raising three daughters and a busy life meant there was little time to get involved in the Wallenberg file (though she was pleased when he became Canada’s first Honorary Citizen in 1985 and when Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating Wallenberg a decade ago).
It’s little surprise that Singer’s art has explored themes of identity, history and memory. The outsider status she felt in her early life “is what made me think about ways of expressing that, either through language or visual imagery. So you go to what you know when you’re an artist.”
In 2016, the Swedish government declared Wallenberg officially dead, but to Singer, that offered no finality. “From what I learned, the Swedish government is not exempt from blame for trying to get Wallenberg out. I cannot reconcile the fact that [Wallenberg’s family] could not exert any kind of leverage over the Russians to find out what happened to him.”
In Judaism, being a godparent carries little or no religious obligation. Singer considers the godfather connection to Wallenberg an honour, “but I’m also very sad that I never met him. I think he would have been a fascinating person to talk to. The story is just very, very tragic.”
The grandmother of nine sighed. Over the decades, the story for her was obviously very personal, “and I was still processing it. Maybe I’m still processing it, for a long, long time.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the Hamilton Jewish News. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Features
And now the news – with Laurence Wall
By GERRY POSNER I am betting that many readers will have memories of the Wall family, formerly of Winnipeg, later of Phoenix and Ottawa. For people with long memories like me, (which memories my grandkids define as old ), that means as far back as Dr. Mark and Elsa Wall. The Walls had four sons: Richard, Laurence, Murray and Bruce. Likely, you will know one or more of the boys. Both Richard and Bruce reside in Phoenix, while Laurence and Murray are in Ottawa. Of course, each has a story, but I was certainly taken by the Laurence Wall story.
Born in Montreal in 1954 at a time when his father was doing post graduate work in OBGYN, Laurence grew up in Winnipeg’s south end, on Lanark Street and later Queenston Bay. Wall graduated from Grant Park High School in 1972. From there he was off to the University of Manitoba, where he obtained a BA in 1975. Later that year, he left for Ottawa where he studied journalism at Carleton University, finishing with a Bachelor of Journalism. While at Carleton, he met Roslyn Nudell from Montreal, also a student in the journalism program. They married in 1978.
Wall began his career at the Winnipeg Tribune (and if you can remember the Walls, you’re sure to remember the Tribune). He was a reporter there from 1976-1979. Then he moved to CBC Radio in Winnipeg, first as a story producer for the network program, “Canada Watch,” then a stint as a writer- broadcaster for “ Information Radio”.
In 1983 Wall moved to CBC Saskatoon (much like professional athletes who move from team to team, although for much less remuneration) where he was a radio reporter until 1985. The next stop was at CBC Fredericton from 1985 through 1993. By that time, Wall had moved up to become a senior news editor at the CBC.
In 1993, Wall was hired as a senior editor in Ottawa. He continued in that position for three years. In 1996, he wanted to return to on-air work, so he moved back into the radio booth at CBC Ottawa. He became the afternoon news presenter and never looked back. For 28 years, he wrote and edited dozens of new stories and audio items for 13 different newscasts and news updates every weekday, amassing more than 50,000 newscasts and news updates to his credit.
He retired on May 31, 2024. That day marked the end of an illustrious 44 years with the CBC at four different stations. If you lived in Ottawa, his name was immediately recognizable – so much so that on May 31, 2024, the mayor of Ottawa declared that “ Laurence Wall Day.”
Over the course of his time with CBC in Ottawa, Wall reported on some of the most significant stroies of the day, including the 1998 ice storm; the day to day ups and downs (I think more downs than ups ) of the Ottawa Senators of the NHL; the killing pf Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial in 2014 – and the chaos that followed; and, of course, Covid 19. In fact, Covid caused a major change in the way Wall presented the news. For Wall broadcasts emanated from the basement of his home in suburban Ottawa, which he jokingly referred to as”CBC Nepean.”
Over the years Wall had the opportunity to meet many celebrities, including Gordon Pinsent, Alan Thicke, Ken Dryden, and Eugene Levy. Wall recounts that, although he didn’t manage to get a photo with Levy, he did get a laugh when he introduced himself to Levy as “just the chopped liver news presenter.” He also interviewed Randy Bachman at the Ottawa Writers Festival.
A side of Wall that is not as well known is his musical bent. Since 2001, Wall hosted hundreds of concerts and events for the Ottawa Music Festival, the Music and Beyond Chamber Festival, the Ottawa Jazz Festival, Opera Lyra Ottawa and the Ottawa Writers Festival. He has worked tirelessly to promote classical music for young people. Not to be forgotten are his own talents on the cello as a player in the 65-member community group known as the Divertimento Orchestra.
Aside from all that, Laurence Wall has MC’d dozens of events for various Jewish organizations in Ottawa, including the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the Weizmann Institute, the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship, the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, Limmud Ottawa, his own Kehillat Beth Israel Synagogue, Active Jewish Adults 50+, and a local choir known as Musica Ebraica. Now that is a list of accomplishments that could fill a “ Wall.”
Laurence and Roslyn are also parents of two daughters and are now grandparents as well to one grandson, with another grandchild on the way. Retirement so far for Wall has been just as fulfilling as his career. You might just say that Laurence Wall has just turned another page in his career.
Features
95-year-old Holocaust survivor invited to be part of new mini-series reliving the end of darkest period of her life
By MYRON LOVE Klara Belkin has led a life writ large. She was the principal cellist for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for 20 years. As well, for many years, in the winters, she and her late husband, Emile, a violinist, were also members of the Tampa Symphony Orchestra in Tampa Bay. As a teacher, she served as a member of the faculty of the University of Manitoba’s School of Music for almost 20 years.
Even though Klara Belkin is 95, her career isn’t quite over yet. Recently, she was invited to join Joshua Bell – in New York in September – in a performance with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra of the soundtrack of a projected new four-part miniseries.
The mini-series, “The Train Near Magdeburg”, is the true story of a train packed with prisoners from Bergen Belsen concentration camp in the early days of April 1945, that was intercepted – and the passengers liberated – by American soldiers.
For Belkin (who moved to Saskatoon four years ago, after her husband died, to be closer to her daughter, Lisa),the story is personal. She, her mother, and her brother, were on that train.
Originally from Szeged in Hungary, she and her family were interned in ghettos in 1944. In June of that year, she, her mother, and her brother, were taken to Austria as farm labourers. (Her father had been taken into the Hungarian army.) In December 1944, they – along with her grandparents – were moved to Bergen Belsen.
“I was lucky in that I was in relatively good health and I was with most of my family,” she said in an earlier interview with the Jewish Post & News, of her time in the concentration camp.
However, in April of 1945, with the Russians closing in, it looked like that luck was about to run out for the 15-year-old and the other surviving prisoners at Bergen Belsen. They were all loaded onto boxcars and sent toward Theresienstadt, where – they feared – death awaited them. Their journey came to an end, however on April 13, on the banks of the Elbe River near Magdeburg. A bridge had been blown out and the train could go no further. There were reports that the train was to be plunged into the river or blown up. Before that could happen, the American army arrived on the scene.
“We couldn’t see anything from inside the boxcars,” Belkin recalled. “Suddenly it went quiet. The SS guards had run away. We heard honking outside and then knocking on the boxcar doors. The doors were opened and we saw an American soldier with a gun aimed at us. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He was no doubt expecting to see German soldiers or munitions. Instead, he saw a boxcar full of half dead people.”
Belkin recalled that they were all moved to a nearby village from which the residents had been evacuated. “There were many of us who had typhus and many – including my grandfather – died shortly after liberation,” Belkin said.
Fortunately, her mother, brother, and grandmother also survived. After liberation, Belkin returned to Budapest where the family reconnected with her father and she studied the cello at the Franz Liszt Academy. Following the Hungarian Revolution in October, 1956, she was able to leave Budapest – with the encouragement of her mother – for Vienna. In Vienna, though, the symphony was not hiring any female musicians. So she came to Canada and found a position with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. That was also where she met her husband, Emile, a violin player, who was also a member of the WSO.
About 15 years ago, Belkin had an opportunity to meet two of the GI’s who liberated her and her family. It started with a New York State high school history project. This story began when Lisa Belkin decided to write her mother’s biography. In the course of her research, she came across a tape of an interview that Diane Sawyer had conducted with Hudson Falls, New York, history teacher Matt Rozell (recorded in 2007). In 2001, Rozell had had his students do interviews with surviving World War II veterans living in the area. First Lieutenant Frank Towers, liaison officer of the 30th Infantry Division, and former tank commander Carrol Walsh (743rd Tank Battalion, 119th Regiment), were among the interviewees. They were the last two living American soldiers from the unit who saved Klara and the other Jewish prisoners – 600 of them children – near war’s end from almost certain death.
Klara, Emile, and Lisa Belkin met the two veterans in Florida in February 2011. “I was never able to put a face to my liberators before,” Klara Belkin said at the time.
It was Frank Towers’ duty to arrange food, shelter and care for the former prisoners. Belkin reports that Towers and Walsh frequently spoke about their war experiences and had been invited to the Weizman Institute in Israel where they met with Bergen Belsen historian Bernd Horstmann.
Belkin notes that a reunion in Israel with Towers, Walsh, Rozell and some of the boxcar survivors was talked about – but nothing came of it.
Lisa Belkin reports that she and he mother have seen the first two episodes of the mini-series. She adds that both the BBC and Netflix may be interested in airing the series in the fall.
Features
How to Use the Internet Safely in Canada
Discover essential tips for using the internet safely in line with the Government’s newest cybersecurity report and whole-of-society approach to digital safety.
Whenever we think we’ve seen it all, the internet chucks something unexpected at the world. In the past few days, we’ve seen two dazzling demonstrations of the power of AI to deceive or convince. First, a hacker infiltrated the internal television screens of the Washington headquarters of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to play a deepfake video of US President Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet. Next, President Trump shared an AI-generated video of his vision for Gaza on his Truth Social account.
At home, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security recently released a report that underlines the need to keep expecting the unexpected. According to their National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026, Canada is experiencing a barrage of digital attacks.
A Perfect Storm of Cyber Criminality
There has been a notable increase in state-sponsored cyber operations to disrupt Canada’s critical infrastructure. The report specifically mentions the aggressive cyber programs of the People’s Republic of China. Looks like Russia also aims to destabilize Canada and its allies.
Another concern is the flourishing underground network of cybercriminals. In this space, foreign threat actors and financially motivated ‘ordinary’ criminals cross paths. They sometimes find enough common ground to scratch each other’s backs. That may be one reason ordinary Canadians face more attempts to steal personal data and sensitive information.
Data breaches do a lot of damage. Apart from the financial loss, it brings reputation damage, and even legal consequences for both individuals and organizations. For example, a Equifax survey showed that 73.5% of all fraudulent credit card applications and 89.3% of all deposit frauds in Q4 2023 resulted from identity fraud.
The Dangers of Data Sharing Among Thieves
Cybercriminals trade stolen information, and this data-sharing trend is becoming a significant concern. With access to more extensive and diverse data pools, these criminal groups can better leverage people’s personal data. A bigger data pool makes criminals more effective and profitable. Even worse, it allows them to shift their focus to more complex and vastly more disruptive projects.
The Government of Canada is taking the increased threat level seriously. They’ve developed the National Cyber Security Strategy (NCSS) to address digital threats. The new plan uses a whole-of-society approach and has a substantial proposed budget.
According to security experts, Canadians can take more steps to use the internet safely. This includes avoiding phishing scams, identity theft, malware attacks, and data breaches. When individuals are safer from fraud and scams, the overall threat to everyone online is reduced.
10 Quick Tips on How to Use the Internet Safely in Canada
It’s not hard to make using the internet safer — a little preparedness goes a long way.
- Install antivirus software and enable your device’s firewall.
- Get a reliable VPN in Canada. A Virtual Private Network is a basic defence system that all devices should have. It encrypts your internet connection to keep out snoopers (like your ISP) and hackers with mayhem on their minds.
- Update devices immediately and keep operating systems (and all your apps) up to date. Updates are important patches addressing security weaknesses and closing loopholes in new exploits.
- Improve your passwords. It is far better to use a password manager to create long, complex passwords or phrases for each account.
- Enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) where possible. Your favourite app or online account is nagging you to enable 2FA for a good reason! 2FA can knock out a considerable percentage of hacking attempts. Would-be hackers with access to your passwords would also need your phone or other authentication device to get into your account.
- Become more privacy-aware. We give away a lot of information by accident. Most people use and accept the default privacy settings on the software and apps they use every day. They’re unaware that the default privacy settings are skewed in advertisers’ favour. Review and adjust the privacy settings on every app, social media account, and search engine you use. Also, check and adjust the settings on your smartphone and other devices. Use your VPN every time you connect to the internet. A VPN changes your IP address and gives you an extra layer of privacy against advertisers and marketers.
- Encrypt sensitive files. Encryption scrambles the file data by making it unreadable to anyone without the correct decryption key.
- Always think: “It might be phishing”. Be suspicious of links that arrive via email, text, or social media. A click could start a malware download. Phishing scams often impersonate well-known businesses like Netflix, Facebook, or government agencies. Phishing attacks are attempts to trick people into divulging sensitive information. Phishing attacks can also lead to hijacking accounts with stolen login credentials.
- Check the legitimacy of websites. Don’t enter personal or financial information on a website that does not display “HTTPS” in the URL. But be cautious even if there is a padlock icon in the address bar. Cybercriminals can easily get a free SSL certificate for a scam website to make it look more professional. If a website seems ‘off’ or the offers are too good to be true, better leave.
- Create a backup. Store copies of important information on an external hard drive or a secure cloud storage service. Making backups won’t make your device safer, but it could help you recover from a cyber incident.
Staying Cyber Aware as a Society
The internet is a vast resource for modern society. Online tools increase productivity, simplify life, and help us learn new things. But cybercriminals have proven they won’t hesitate to use these tools to create havoc. There is always a new threat on the horizon, so we must keep learning and striving to stay informed about emerging threats.