With the 76th anniversary of the end of WWII nearing, May 8th poses as a reminder that although the Holocaust seems like something left in the past, we must continue to learn lessons from it and hear from those who survived. Lillian Boraks-Nemetz is an author, an academic, a mother, sister, daughter and a child survivor of the Holocaust.
In her fiction novel, The Mouth of Truth: Buried Secrets, she tells a beautiful, yet painful story of the memories she had to revisit to unravel the truths about her life as a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. After living in the ghetto for 18 months from November 1940, Boraks-Nemetz got out due to the tireless efforts of her father and hid in a Polish village for the remainder of the war under a false identity (Boraks-Nemetz, Vancouver Holocaust Education Center).
Throughout her life, her father was an important figure that guided her and is remembered by her as someone “who wore the hats of a poet, an artist, a lawyer and a policeman. But most of all, he was a caring father, the kindest being she had ever known, and his love for her has been the light of her existence” (Boraks-Nemetz, 70). The Mouth of Truth was published in 2018 and despite it being classified as fiction, is a true story that gives her father a voice amongst all the controversy that he had faced.
To save his family, Boraks-Nemetz’s father became a Jewish policeman for the ghetto and was called a collaborator and defamed for the actions that he took as forced on him by the Nazis. After passing away in Montreal, eight former ghetto policemen were put on trial as collaborators, but her father “wasn’t there to defend himself, so his name has never been cleared, [and] that’s why [Boraks-Nemetz wrote] this book” (Boraks-Nemetz, interviewed by Kit Krieger).
Read more here at the University of British Columbia website.