1. Both of my parents survived the Holocaust but lost most of their family members to the Nazi gas chambers. The only thing my father had left after the war was his flour mill, so when he received word that the Communist government was planning to nationalize all private property and seal the borders, he decided that there was no future in Hungary. Together with eight relatives, my parents (not yet married at the time) crossed the border illegally into Yugoslavia, thereby becoming refugees. Their intention was to run the British blockade and settle in Eretz Yisrael. They heard that hachsharot for this purpose had been established in northern Italy, and so they made their way to Milan. Once there, they were sent to the displaced persons’ camp in Grugliasco. They lived there from April 1946 to September 1948, at which time they departed to Canada. I was born on March 5, 1948, not in Grugliasco, which had no maternity facilities, but at the Maria Vittoria Hospital in Turin.
2. My father never speaks about his life before arriving in Canada: This is his way of dealing with the trauma of his horrific wartime experiences. My mother more than compensates for him, however. Before I made contact with Sara Vincon, my mother was my sole source of information about life in the DP camp. While I was growing up, she always found opportunities to tell me stories about Grugliasco because she believed it was important for me to know about it. She looks back at the involuntary sojourn there in extremely positive terms. She sees the DP camp as a sort of sanatorium where she and all the others could recuperate from the terrible torments they had endured. They had been demoralized by their encounter with human beings at their absolute worst, and they despaired of the future of humanity. As my mother has it, in Grugliasco the Jewish refugees met many ordinary Italians who were warm, compassionate, and generous people. This experience impressed upon them that not all human beings are Jew-murdering Nazis. In time, they were able to regain their faith in humanity, and they began, ever so tentatively, to think optimistically about the future. After nearly three years, they were sufficiently healed that they were ready to go out into the world and rebuild their shattered lives.
3. The first visit was in April 1994. My wife and I were going to a Bar Mitzvah of family friends in Milan. My mother had recently established contact with Liana Millu of Genoa. After reading Liana’s book about her experiences in Auschwitz, my mother realized that they had been there at the same time and in close proximity, and she was eager to meet her. I suggested that she come with us to the Bar Mitzvah, and we could travel the triangle of Milan, Genoa, and Turin. It was actually my idea to look for the site of the DP camp in Grugliasco. Because of my mother’s stories, I was curious to see with my own eyes the place where I started life. No one else in the family had ever expressed interest in this subject, and we had no idea what, if anything, we would find. We were astonished to discover that the site had reverted to its originally designed function as a psychiatric hospital. It was very emotional for my mother to see once again after so many years the place that had been her home during a crucial turning point in her life. As she told the staff we met in the hospital, she was returning to Grugliasco per dire grazie to the Italian people for helping her in her rehabilitation as a human being.
4. I have internalized the essence of my mother’s view that Grugliasco was a crucial way station on my family’s journey from despair to hope, a necessary prelude to their successful building of a new life in Canada. For this, I am forever grateful. However, unlike my mother, having been blessedly spared her horrific primary experiences, I have no need to romanticize either the place or the people. The Grugliasco camp was actually a rather dreadful place to live, and a great many Italians have plenty to be ashamed of when it comes to their prewar and wartime behaviour, specifically with regard to the Jews in their midst. Perhaps the kindness shown to the refugees after the war was a return to the norms of behaviour of a fundamentally civilized people. Perhaps it was the collective expression of a great many guilty consciences. Or perhaps my mother unwittingly exaggerated the positive attributes of Italians as a whole out of a desperate need to believe in the redeemability of humankind.
5. It was a deeply moving experience both times to reconnect with my origins, but in different ways. The first time, I had no idea whether any trace was even left of the camp, as no one had ever inquired about it since 1948, and I knew not a single soul in the vicinity. The second time, I knew exactly what I would find, and I had developed a whole web of contacts. I was particularly touched to discover the Turin Jewish community, of whose existence I had not previously been aware. I found myself thinking that this would have been my own community, had my parents been able to stay in Italy and not immigrated to Canada.
6. Staying in Italy was not an option for my parents, both because of the large number of refugees at the time and because of the desperate postwar economic crisis. After almost three years of stagnating in Grugliasco, they were anxious to go anywhere in the world where they could live a normal, dignified life. They wanted to go to Eretz Yisrael, but the British blockade made it difficult and dangerous to get through. They patiently awaited their turn to disappear in the middle of the night and board a boat in Genoa. But by the time the State of Israel was proclaimed, I had just been born, and my parents were not anxious to take their baby into a war zone after all they had been through. In the meantime, a delegation from the heavily Jewish Canadian Fur Workers’ Union arrived in Italy to recruit experienced fur workers. In actuality, this was a humanitarian mission to bring as many Jewish refugees as possible to Canada at a time when Canadian immigration policy was blatantly and shockingly anti-Semitic. My father, uncle, and cousin were all accepted by the delegation, although none of them had ever touched a fur. Under the terms of their contract with the government, they were obliged to work as furriers for one year. As soon as the year was up, the three men opened their own fur shop in downtown Toronto. Shortly afterwards, they started building houses, about which they knew even less than they knew about furs. They went on to establish H&R Developments, one of the largest and most respected real estate development firms in Canada.
7. There are about 360,000 Jews in Canada. Of these, 175,000 live in Toronto, 100,000 in Montreal, and the rest are scattered across the country in smaller communities. In keeping with the global trend, the smaller centers are gradually disappearing, and Jewish life is being consolidated in the major centers. When my family arrived in Toronto in 1948, there were only about 60,000 Jews living here. The Jewish population has exploded in step with the extremely dynamic growth of the city in recent decades. Toronto is a multicultural city consisting mostly of immigrants. By the way, the largest ethnic group in Toronto after the original English inhabitants is the Italians who came in the fifties looking for work. I am fascinated by the fact that they were employed mostly as construction workers, largely by Jewish immigrant builders like my father. Working together, the Italians and the Jews have built Toronto into a great city. From my personal perspective, I see some sort of poetic justice here.

Because so many of the Jews in Toronto are of the first generation in Canada, they tend to have a much stronger Jewish identity than their counterparts in large cities in the United States, who have mostly lived there for many generations and are therefore much more assimilated. An atypically high proportion is religiously observant. We even have quite a few ultra-Orthodox and Hasidim. For a similar reason, the Jewish community of Toronto is one of the most strongly Zionist in the world. Many members have made aliya, including my own daughter Tamar and her family. The Toronto Jewish community is quite affluent overall, but more importantly, it is highly philanthropic. There is a wonderful range of Jewish institutions such as schools, synagogues, community centers, and the world-renowned Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care.

In short, Toronto is a wonderful place to live, and a wonderful place to live as a Jew. Except for the climate: No one I know chooses to live in Toronto because of the climate.

Sometimes things just happen to work out for the best, not a trifling matter considering my parents’ history and the blind circumstances that brought them here. Yet although it is in so many respects a much longer way from Toronto to Torino than the similarity in the names would indicate, my birthplace will always hold a special place in my heart. I look forward to maintaining and deepening my relationship with the Jewish community of Torino, and I wish my new friends there much success in all their endeavours.