Onni Milne's story of Channa

My mother, Channa Veller Milner, died of a  heart attack in 1981.  She was in her 70s.  It wasn't until after her death that I realized she was more than what I had experienced with her. 

My mother and father were both Jewish Lithuanians. They grew up in Kovna, Lithuania. They knew each other as children. My mother's mother and my father's mother had been friends for years. They both had stalls in the local market. My mother's mother sold milk products. My mother's father was a skilled carpenter who carved areas in synagogues.

My father fell in love with my mother when he was nine years old. They were married in their 20s. My father was a plumber, a highly paid job in the time when plumbing was being installed in dwellings and buildings. My mother was exotically beautiful as a young woman and became a couturier. According to comments from a relative who knew them in Europe, “All the grandest ladies from the town came to see her at her salon.” They were a sophisticated, trendy couple of the times. She was a successful businesswoman with several women working under her. 

All that changed when Hitler invaded Lithuania in 1941. My father had left to look for his brother in the gulag area. My mother told him that she would ask for a divorce if he didn’t return. So she was alone with 2 children when the Germans came. A baby girl, who had just been born, saved their lives because a Nazi officer who noticed the baby sent them to the line of those who would live.  But the baby died soon after. Their son was murdered during a Children's Action where the children were rounded up and sent to the Ninth Fort to be shot. During her time in the Stutthof Concentration Camp, she befriended another woman and in defence of her, risked instant death by speaking back to the camp capo, a violent guard who supervised them.  She created health for herself by volunteering for night duty to keep the fire burning in the barracks.  In this way, she melted snow to keep herself clean and free from the typhus surrounding her. 

My father survived the Dachau Concentration Camp and ended up in Berlin after the war.  When he learned my mother was alive in a Baltic fishing village, he travelled there to find her.  They escaped from the village with the aid of a Jewish Russian officer and ended up in the Eschwege Displaced Persons Camp.  My twin sister and I were born there in 1946.

My mother had a brother who survived and travelled to New York after the war ended. Her older sister had married in Kovna and travelled to Vancouver before the war started. So she was here when we arrived in Vancouver in 1948. Another sister had been living in Belgium and died during the war.

 I learned her story when my father and I translated her memoir after she died.  I deeply regret I knew only the woman affected by her experiences who seemed to me to be someone completely lacking creativity and independence.