Vivian Stockhamer
“As it says in the Passover Haggadah: “in every generation they rise up against us”, therefore stand tall and speak out against those who want to destroy us as silence is not the answer.”
Vivian Stockhamer was born in Lida, Poland in 1938. In 1941, the Nazis moved her family into the ghetto. On May 8, 1942 all 6,700 Jews of the town were marched to the killing field outside the city where her father and sister were murdered. Vivian and her mother were saved for slave labour. On Sept. 17, 1943, the Nazis returned to round up the remaining Jews. Vivian escaped to the forest with her aunt and uncle, but her mother was captured and taken to Majdanek where she was murdered. Vivian spent two years in the forests with the partisans until being liberated by the Russians and sent to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. In 1948 she moved to Canada to live with family in Toronto. There she met her late husband, Saul, also a Holocaust survivor. They were blessed with two children and six grandchildren.
