IHRA – International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

This article is taken from the McGill Daily dated Feb. 26, 2020.

by Abbas Mehrabian. On February 18, Holocaust survivor and social activist Suzanne Weiss spoke at Concordia University about her life, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Islamophobia, and the climate crisis.

“Back in 1942, Adolf Hitler marked me down for death. I was only one year old. Why did Hitler want to kill me?’’ Weiss started her speech by recalling the first time her life was at risk. Born into a Jewish family in Paris in Nazi-occupied France, she answered the question herself: “Because he was a racist, a white supremacist.”

It took her several decades to find out how she was saved: “There was a civilian resistance which obstructed the Nazi rule and provided refuge for thousands of Jews, including me,” she told the attendees, adding, “It was also a multitude of individuals who helped [in various ways]. A multitude of small individual acts of courage and kindness forged a chain of solidarity across the country, which helped defeat the Nazis.” Her parents did not survive – Weiss’ mother was deported to Auschwitz, while her father died of war wounds, leaving her an orphan.

After the liberation of France, at age nine she was adopted by a Jewish American family in New York. Her stepfather had a narrow view of women, believing their destiny was to “find a mate, marry, and take care of [their] husband and household and their children.” She rejected this stereotype, and at age 17, she left home and took refuge with a girlfriend. Weiss recalled, “It was illegal for a girl of my age to leave home without permission. My parents had me arrested and charged my girlfriend’s mother for influencing me to be a lesbian!”

by Hussein Hoballah

Suzanne Weiss, Jewish advocate for Palestinian human rights and author of “Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey” (Fernwood, 2019), contributed the following response to our questions in Sada Almashrek, an Arabic-English publication in Montreal.

Though the “anti-Semitism” narrative is today being made bait at large to hit back hard on any criticisers of Israel, outspoken Weiss says she, like many other Jews, refuses the Israeli authorities’ unjust treatment and supports, instead, al-Quds Day, as well as collaboration with Muslims to fight real anti-Semitism and any other form of racism.

Mrs Weiss says that her activism on behalf of Palestine is based on the principle of “universalism” found in both Jewish and Islamic faiths.

Now nearing eighty, Suzanne Weiss still enjoys a strong memory of major global incidents that have shaped today’s injustices and is therefore determined to make a difference.

1) Mrs Weiss, it is amazing to read your book Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, and learn about your personal journey, so would you please briefly share some background info on it?

When I was an infant child, a Jew in France under Fascist occupation, the Nazis targeted me to be killed. After the Nazi defeat, I wondered how I had survived. Over the decades, I pieced the story together: my survival was the work of a broad movement of solidarity that saved many thousands of other Jewish children.

Category: IHRA – International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Suzanne Weiss, Holocaust Survivor, Speaks on Her Life and Activism

Interview in: Sada Almashrek