Liberation not a moment too soon

Ninety-nine percent of the time Larry Mann performed in studio, on camera for voice-over to make us laugh.
Ninety-nine percent of the time Larry Mann performed in studio, on camera for voice-over to make us laugh.

Most of the time, Larry D. Mann was a comedian. In the 1950s, when I met him, Larry would warm up audiences for my father’s television show, The Barris Beat, on CBC. He also appeared in comic sketches on the show. His perfect delivery of punch lines, his deadpan facial expressions and his huge guffaws broke up every audience he ever met. Once, however, Larry Mann made me cry. He described a day in the spring of 1945.

“We weren’t prepared for what we saw when we arrived at the concentration camp,” he said. “We couldn’t get in the front gate because there were bodies, hundreds of bodies, piled up like cordwood. We hadn’t seen the pits yet…” (more…)

To condemn or save

The railway tracks into the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp proved to be a one-way trip to extermination.
The railway tracks into the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp proved to be a one-way trip to extermination.

I met a couple of teachers this week. At least, I came to know a little of their stories. There’s not much I can relate. They were both Polish. One was named Ciechanowski Jan, born in March 1882. And Brem Jerzy was born in September 1914, as the Great War began. They both came to the area of Poland, around Krakow, in 1941. Or, more correctly, they were brought there, to the small town of Oswiecim, which German armies then occupied. Only the Nazis renamed the place Auschwitz. And here’s the way their records summed up those two teachers:

“Jan, number 11193, executed Oct. 29, 1941” and “Jerzy, number 10190, executed August 19, 1942.”

(more…)