SZTANKOVITS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-01-24 published
SZTANKOVITS,
Anna (née
SCHMUCK)
(June 20, 1931-January 21, 2006)
Of Runnymede Healthcare Centre. Arrangement strictly private.
Anna is survived by husband Sandor.
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SZTEYN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-11-09 published
Theodore STEIN,
Holocaust
Survivor: (1918-2006)
Successful immigrant bore no ill will toward Canada even though
it refused entry to his parents, who died in the camps
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S7
Theodore (Ted)
STEIN's life began to unravel 68 years ago tonight.
Of course, there had been stark warnings that went mostly unheeded.
This Hitler is just a nut; he will pass. We are Austrians, after
all, and secular. We will be all right. You'll see.
The delusion that gripped countless others in Vienna's 170,000-strong
Jewish community had seeped its way into the
STEIN household,
despite the fact that by the autumn of 1938, the Nazi swastika
flew in every corner of the city. It had been eight months since
the Anschluss ingested Austria into the Third Reich.
The beginning of the end for Mr.
STEIN -- indeed, all European
Jewry -- took place on the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi
storm troopers and local hooligans, emboldened by news of the
assassination of a German official in Paris -- by a Jew -- took
to the streets. In dozens of German and Austrian cities, synagogues
were torched and the windows of Jewish-owned homes and businesses
smashed. The event would take its name from the terrifying scenes
on the formerly grand boulevards: Kristallnacht -- the Night
of Broken Glass.
Officials arrested some 6,000 Austrian Jews, deporting them to
Dachau.
Among them was Mr.
STEIN's father, Jacob. Only those
who promised to emigrate immediately, leaving their property
behind, were released. Twenty-seven Austrian Jews were murdered
in the pogrom.
Mr. STEIN, then a 20-year-old man-about-town who frequented the
theatre and opera, was arrested on the steps of his family's
flat and hauled to a local school for processing. An SS sergeant
put him in charge of stoking a wood stove. Mr.
STEIN bent over
to do so. "You showed your ass to me!" the Nazi bellowed, and
proceeded to administer a ferocious beating to the young man.
A few minutes later, the same thing happened. The scenario played
out several more times before the officer relented.
The STEINs had been highly assimilated, acculturated and were
well-to-do merchants who had owned two lighting-fixture shops
in Vienna before they were confiscated. Regina
STEIN, the clan's
matriarch, bribed officials to get her husband out of Dachau
and her son into Switzerland. Her daughter had already escaped
to Palestine.
The
Swiss promptly dumped Mr.
STEIN back into Austria. But his
luck changed just two weeks before the Second World War broke
out in September, 1939, when he was among thousands of Jewish
refugees taken in by Britain.
In London, he worked briefly for British intelligence, transcribing
German messages that were later decoded.
Back in Vienna, Mr.
STEIN's parents were desperate. They wrote
to officials in Canada, reporting that they had been "left without
means of assistance and with no possibility of earning a living."
They were stateless and penniless and begged to come to this
country. "Our distress… increases daily and there is nothing
left for us but suicide.… Our only hope for survival is admission
to Canada."
But, as detailed in the book None is Too Many, from which the
above quote is taken, Ottawa's policy on admitting Jewish refugees
was dismal, and the
STEINs were turned down. Regina
STEIN perished
at Treblinka, her husband at Auschwitz.
Their son, meanwhile, was admitted to Canada in the summer of
1940 as a friendly prisoner of war, and he spent four years in
an internment camp outside Quebec City. He was then sent to work
on a farm near Hamilton, but hated it, and said as much to a
stranger who picked him up while hitchhiking. The man drove Mr.
STEIN
to Toronto, where he was lent $35 by the United Jewish Refugee
and War Relief Agency.
He lived in an unheated ground-floor apartment and worked at
a plastics company for $13 a week. "Too much to die, too little
to live," said his wife of 60 years, Patricia. He spent the next
20 years in a series of business ventures, including children's
clothing and hosiery, before finding a place in real estate at
the age of 50.
"He had a flair for it," remarked his wife. "He was tenacious,
you know. But boy, did he work hard."
Like many who survived that era, Mr.
STEIN was resolutely determined
to make it in the country that took him in, despite the fact
that Canada admitted a paltry 5,000 Jewish refugees from 1933 to
1945. "He harboured no ill will," said his son, Jeffrey. "He
loved Canada."
The family is now busy wading through a small mound of war-era
documents, many emblazoned with the Nazi eagle-and-swastika rubber
stamp, and some in the name of "Theodore Israel
SZTEYN," referencing
the middle name the Nazis forced Jews to take (it was Sarah for
women).
"My father never regarded himself as a victim," his son said.
"He used to say that if the Holocaust hadn't happened, he would
have become a bum. He said the Holocaust made him a man."
Theodore STEIN was born in Vienna on August 13, 1918. He died
in Toronto of Parkinson's Disease on October 22. He was 88. He
leaves his wife Patricia, son Jeffrey and four grandchildren.
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