Mariette was only 5 years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, in 1940. Her family was soon torn apart, and from that moment, she and her siblings found themselves scattered across the city and countryside, hiding with non-Jews in convents and orphanages.
Her childhood was robbed from her as she fled from the Nazis for five years, learning how to pick locks, throw a knife, jump from moving vehicles, and hide in a sewer filled with rats to escape from the clutches of the Gestapo. Throughout these harrowing years, she never cried. She recounted becoming a child of silence, focused solely on survival.
Mariette arrived in Canada in 1947, around the age of 12, with her three siblings. As an adult, she has been active with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center, telling her story, and has written the book, “A Childhood Unspoken.” She also co-chaired the 2019 conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. Like so many other Holocaust survivors, she has worked tirelessly to educate the world on the horrors the Nazis committed, the systematic murder of 6 million Jewish people, so that this never ever happens again.
It was heartbreaking to hear her story, but the question Mariette would ask at the event was even more heartbreaking: “Are all the stories we’ve shared from that time and the Holocaust education been for nothing?”
The antisemitic rise in Canada and around the world has been horrific and alarming. For her, it is almost like reliving her childhood all over again, as Jew-hatred and false characterizations about the Jewish people continue to flood our society with little to nothing being done about it.
In cities like Toronto and Montreal especially, contempt and disinformation are directed at Israel and the Jewish people, and it seems to surface almost weekly. Pro-Palestinian protesters brazenly chant, “There is only one solution… Intifada revolution!” These words have meaning, and they directly reference the killing of Jews. During the first and second intifadas that took place in Israel from 1987 to 2005, the goal of Palestinians was to kill Jews—and now they are openly calling for it to return on Canadian streets.
