She survived starvation, forced labour camps and came within a breath of death at the hands of the Nazis, yet even under the darkest of circumstances her spirit couldn’t be broken.
Chana Szpilman Wallace, one of North America’s oldest Holocaust survivors, lived through the most notorious death camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
With death omnipresent for more than five years of Wallace’s life, her family credits her spirituality and belief in humanity for surviving and allowing her to live a long and healthy life.
“She had a strong spirit, but most of all she had an unbreakable faith in her devotion to God,” said Helene Shifman, Wallace’s niece.
Just shy of her 107 birthday, Wallace passed away peacefully on Feb. 16 surrounded by her family at Toronto General Hospital.
“We’ve lost her, but we haven’t lost her, because her legacy will continue to live through all of us,” Shifman said.
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That legacy began in Poland in 1907 when Wallace was born as the second youngest of eight children in a family widely known for its musical talent. Her father was a renowned violinist who taught her first cousin, Wladyslaw Szpilman, protagonist of the 2002 film The Pianist.
At age 18 she married Yankel Lustig and by 20 gave birth to her first son, Liebela. Two years later, she had a second son, Uris, who died of pneumonia at 2½ weeks.
After the 1939 occupation of Poland, Wallace was forced to flee her home and was soon taken to a labour camp.
After surviving years without enough food and watching others perish around her, Wallace was transported to Auschwitz in September 1944 where she stared death in the face.
When Wallace disembarked from the train, Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who tortured prisoners using deadly human experiments, was directing the new arrivals. Those sent to the right were forced to work, those sent left went to the gas chambers.
Wallace was sent right.
In January 1945, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. British and Canadian soldiers eventually freed Wallace and thousands of others in April 1945.
Both her parents and all but one of her seven siblings died during the war. Within a year she was reunited with her husband, but learned that their son was killed at the age of 17 by Polish hoodlums after the war. Her husband died soon after.
“She regained her faith, her hope and her strength in humanity by embracing the growth of her spirit,” said Shifman.
“She did that not only with optimism and her faith in God, but also through her extraordinary capacity to find joy in every moment in her life. She celebrated every moment; there was never a bad day.”
After the conclusion of the war, Wallace lived in Munich, Germany, for a short time before her brother-in-law sponsored her move to Canada in 1948.
In 1950, she married her second husband, David Wallace. They ran two businesses in North York, a newsstand and then a women’s clothing store on Yonge St., north of Lawrence Ave.
After her second husband died in 1963, Wallace devoted herself to her Canadian family.
In 1997, Wallace shared her compelling story in Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah project, a visual history of the Holocaust as chronicled through survivors’ videotaped testimonies.
Wallace leaves her niece, Helene Shifman, two nephews, five great-nephews, a great-niece and countless others whose lives she touched.