Alex Buckman

Never a Child

One could say that Alex Buckman never had a childhood, moving from the
age of two from home to home while living in fear of imminent death.

Born in 1939, in Brussels, Belgium, Alex Buckman was only a

baby when the Germans invaded Belgium. Alexs father, in a
desperate bid to save his young son, paid a Catholic family to
shield Alex before he and his wife were transported to
Auschwitz. Over the next two years, Alex was moved from
one home to another, as each family, in turn, turned the boy
away for fear of reprisal.
At the age of four, Alex was placed in a Catholic orphanage. Alex lived in fear for the
next two and a half years, remembering the cellar he cowered in when the Nazis
searched the orphanage for Jews. Alex heard guttural shouts in German and the
loud stomps of the Nazi boots overhead as he crouched in the dark, cold, and lonely
cellar.
When the war ended, Alex watched as other parents came to reclaim their children.
Not Alex, whose parents perished in Auschwitz. For six months, Alex languished.
Then the Red Cross came, brought Alex to Brussels, and posted his name, along
with other orphaned children, on poles throughout the city.
Fortunately, Alexs uncle, Herman Teitelbaum, found Alexs name there. He and his
wife, Rebecca, raised Alex as their son. Some years later, Alex, by then in Montreal,
married Collette Roy in 1962, and moved soon afterward to Vancouver, where he
has had a successful career in the banking industry.
Alex has become a compelling speaker and educator in Greater Vancouver,
Vancouver Island, and Calgary. He is also a strong advocate for child survivors,
serving as president of the Child Survivor Group at the Vancouver Holocaust
Education Center for the last decade and as Treasurer of the World Federation of
Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors.
Alex is the proud father of one and takes great joy in spending time with his three
grandchildren.
http://www.yadvashem.ca/pages/education/survivors/survivor_AlexBuckman.html

For Rebeccas story..

Recipes As Resistance
April 12, 2010

This post was originally published as Yom Hashoah: Recovered Recipes From A Vanished
World on the Kosher.com blog on April 12, 2010.
For victims of the Holocaust, recipes, a treasured cultural inheritance normally passed from generation
to generation, also became a vital source of resistance.
Love it or hate it, we all carry a culinary legacy. During the Holocaust, where food represented life and
death, recipes represented a precious link to the culture that the Nazis and their allies tried to destroy.
As Holocaust educator, Myrna Goldberg notes, talking about food and exchanging recipes, even, or
especially, in such terrible circumstances boosted womens sense of community. As women
recollected recipes, they taught one another the art of cooking and baking, and, in the process of
teaching, they reclaimed their importance and dignity. Teaching offered hope that there would be a
next generation hope for survival.

Better Days: Recipes as Spiritual Resistance

For most in the Shoah, recipes could only be recalled as a link to better times. In rare cases, though,
Jewish women were able to record their own recipes, or collect and write down those of others
imprisoned with them. One of the very few such recipe books to survive the Shoah belonged to
Rebecca Teitelbaum, who, as a forced laborer in Ravensbruck, managed to steal paper, pencil, needle
and thread to write and sew together a tiny, 110-page book of the recipes she recalled from home.
The women around her found comfort in reading the recipes aloud to one another. Teitelbaum lost the
book during her forced evacuation from the camp, but a stranger found it and succeeded in returning

it to her in Belgium, where he located her two years later. The book is now housed in the Vancouver
Holocaust Education Center

Source: The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration

Camp
By Rochelle G. Saidel