An Afternoon at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre

Last weekend, I was one of a room-full of participants at a book fair held at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. The event was a way of introducing the public to memoirs and in my case, a novel, inspired by real-life stories from the Holocaust. Many of the presenters were older people, Holocaust survivors who understand how important it is to share their experiences with the next generation.

I have to admit I did feel a little like I was flogging my wares at a flea market! That's because we presenters sat at long tables, each of us with a small pile of our own books for sale. (Let's just say I far prefer writing books to having to sell them personally!)

But it was good to see familiar faces in the local writing community, and also to meet new ones. It turned out that my books and I were sitting next to Brenda Spigelman-Ajzenkopf. Brenda is the author of a poetry collection called Secondhand Shoes (Shoreline). Until her recent retirement, Brenda worked as a secretary in the social work department at the Jewish General Hospital. It was there she discovered that she enjoyed and had a talent for writing. "I wrote poems for parties," Brenda told me.

Brenda's parents were Polish Jews. She was born in Munich, shortly after World War II. My mum, also a Holocaust survivor, never told me about her wartime experiences until I began doing the research for my 2008 YA novel, What World Is Left. Brenda's parents were more open about what they had gone through. I asked Brenda what made her write her poems and she told me: "I had to get it out. I had it in me for so many years. I never thought about what I would do with it."

Brenda's husband, Hymie Ajzenkopf, is also the child of Holocaust survivors. He was born ten days after the liberation of Poland. Like his wife, he, too, is recently retired. I hope that means we'll get to read his story too!