Irena Peritz died peacefully in Montreal on Jan. 30, her 98th birthday.Courtesy of family
By the time Irena Koretz turned 16, her family had been forced from their home in Warsaw, fled to four different locations, endured a year in a slave labour camp and survived four months hiding in a cramped attic.
The four of them, including her sister and parents, were the only Jewish family to survive the war intact out of thousands in Boryslaw, Poland (now part of Ukraine), she would later say.
She documented unimaginable days of terror and deprivation in a diary with a pencil and neat handwriting. Her poetic entry on Aug. 8, 1944, when Soviet troops finally overpowered the Nazis, was of a teen wise beyond her years as she emerged from hiding.
Irena Peritz was a Holocaust survivor who kept a diary chronicling her experience of the war.Courtesy of family
“My legs, a little wobbly and weak, carry me outside as though I were in a dream. For the first time in four months I feel wind and sun against my skin. I fill my lungs with fresh air and breathe freedom.
“I have nothing, but I have everything – my life.”
Those words capture her spirit, said Ms. Peritz’s daughter Ingrid Peritz, a former Globe and Mail reporter.
“As the years went on, she never stopped feeling wonder at the wind and the sun on her skin or the joy of fresh air,” Ingrid said. “And especially, she never lost her gratitude for simply being alive when so many others had perished.”
Irena Peritz died peacefully in Montreal on Jan. 30, her 98th birthday.
Ms. Peritz translated and published her diary 21 years ago with the help of her friend Sally Spilhaus, partly to educate others, but mostly to honour victims of the Holocaust. She donated the diary, a friendship book filled with sketches and tributes from dear childhood friends, as a well as her memoir, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
She wanted to pay homage to the non-Jews who risked their lives to save her family, and to her beloved Jewish friends and family members who did not survive, Ms. Peritz said in a 2005 interview with The Montreal Gazette. She expressed no anger or bitterness and instead was philosophical about how she chose to live despite the deep trauma.
“It gave me a wonderful appreciation of life and a feeling that life doesn’t owe me anything, because I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place,” Ms. Peritz said. “It’s the experiences … that you don’t live through that you should regret, not the ones you do.”
Her story also appears in an anthology featuring the narratives of 20 Canadian women who survived the Holocaust, published by the Azrieli Foundation, a charity “inspired by Jewish values, including tikkun olam – ‘healing the world.’” At the 2017 launch of Before All Memory is Lost: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust, Ms. Peritz spoke eloquently about the importance of preserving their history for future generations.
Ms. Peritz with her sister, Olga.Courtesy of family
“We are the last generation of witnesses to the horrors and cruelty that humans can inflict on one another,” she told the audience. “It’s up to us to make our children and grandchildren aware that injustice and discrimination existed then and still exist today.”
To those who knew her, her greatest legacy was the example she set as a profoundly kind woman who appreciated all that life threw at her – both good and bad.
She had a remarkable presence and the ability to make a person feel like they were the only other person in the room. She held your hand, looked you straight in the eyes with her signature warm smile and listened intently. She had a memory like a vault.
The epitome of humility, she would wave away any flattery, wondering aloud why people liked her – she wasn’t that smart or interesting, she’d say, she never went to college, she didn’t have a degree. It was her genuine interest in humanity that drew people to her.
“She had a PhD in life,” her son-in-law Josh Freed said. “And we all loved being in her class.”
This insatiable curiosity was her special gift, according to nephew Emil Sher.
“Degree, schmagree,” he said. “She was always asking questions about me, my family, my friends. She’d ask me about friends of friends.
“And she had the courage to ask questions of herself.”
Irena Koretz was born on Jan. 30, 1928 in Boryslaw, Poland, to Joseph Koretz, a general manager for an international plumbing company and Rosalia Koretz (née Müller), a homemaker. Irena was raised alongside her older sister, Olga, in a comfortable home in Warsaw, where Irena attended the private Zofia Kurmanowa school, along with children who were mostly non-Jewish. She and her sister enjoyed skiing, swimming and family vacations. Life was good.
Ms. Peritz said her family were the only Jewish family to survive the war intact out of thousands in Boryslaw, Poland (now part of Ukraine).Courtesy of family
But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, starting the Second World War, the family fled east, arriving in Lwów (now part of Ukraine), and took refuge with relatives.
Within a few months, they returned to Boryslaw, where Joseph resumed work with his plumbing firm. The family felt a slight return to normalcy in the familiar community and under Russian occupation.
“We shared secrets and laughter, played in the park and celebrated birthdays,” Irena wrote in her diary of her friends at primary school. “In this period of innocence, unaware of what was to come, I was happy.”
That calm was shattered when the Germans advanced in July 1941. By mid-February, 1943, 600 Jews from the city’s workshops and sawmill, and Jews from the ghetto considered unfit for labour were shot to death.
The Koretz family somehow evaded several pogroms, and soon after, moved to a labour camp in Mraźnica, on the outskirts of Boryslaw, which provided some security to the remaining Jews of Boryslaw until 1944. Irena wrote that during this time, she and her friends “lived intensely, as if each day could be our last.
“We laughed and we loved and talked of the day we would be free.”
In March, 1944, as rumours spread that their camp was the next target for extermination, Irena and her mother were offered a hiding place in a Catholic family’s hayloft on the outskirts of Boryslaw. Olga and her father stayed behind, working for a German oil company. Finally, when it was clear they, too, were on the Nazis’ radar, Joseph got money from a gentile friend in Warsaw and paid for space in an attic.
The four family members shared two cots in the same room where the owners slept in their bed. For four months, they huddled silently, so as not to raise the suspicions of the downstairs neighbours. On Aug. 8, 1944, the owner told Joseph, “The Russians are here, now you can leave. But your family must stay until it gets dark because I don’t want the neighbours to see I was hiding Jews.”
In 2012, Ms. Peritz’s poignant videotaped story was one of several played while mourners lit memorial candles at Montreal’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust.
It is a testament to her impact on others that, as a higher than expected number of mourners streamed into a Montreal funeral home for her memorial on a cold February day, the staff scurried to change the venue to a larger room.
There were people from her old running, hiking and skiing groups, her children’s high school friends, who remembered the warm welcome they received at the Peritz home, and some of her new friends from her seniors residence.
Ms. Peritz documented unimaginable days of terror and deprivation in her diary during the war.Courtesy of family
They were friendships built since arriving in Quebec City in 1949 with her parents and sister aboard the RMS Samaria.
From there, they joined an aunt in Montreal and soon after, Irena, who was 21 and unmarried, learned she was pregnant. When the baby was born, she placed him for adoption, but she never forgot him. Every year, his birthday stirred a yearning to know who he had become. Two years before her death, she would finally know.
In May, 1953, Irena married Simon Peritz, forging a union that lasted 49 years until his death in 2002. Ms. Peritz enrolled their three children – Nina, Paul and Ingrid – in French schools which, at the time, was unheard of for non-francophones.
She instilled in them her passion for books, the arts and physical activity, and they, in turn, passed on some of their mother’s qualities to the next generation.
“We raised our children to be sensitive, strong, kind, to stay humble, to never wallow, to be a survivor and to find courage and resilience every day,” her daughter Nina Peritz said.
Irena Peritz was a long-time member of the “Lunch Bunch” running group at the Young Men and Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YM-YWHA), where she met Don and Jean Goldberg. They introduced her to a rustic hiking camp in Maine, where she spent a week every summer for about 20 years.
“She’d swim in the lake before breakfast,” Jean Goldberg said. “And that was just a warm-up for her.
“She was so spectacular,” Ms. Goldberg said. “People would gather around her because she was truly interested in people and their lives and she was very sincere.”
Ms. Peritz hiked well into her 80s, always in awe of the natural beauty she encountered, and she inspired many who crossed her path, her daughter Ingrid said.
“Hikers immediately stepped to the side as they saw this white-haired lady marching up the mountain trail with her walking sticks,” she said. “It’s as if they formed an honour guard to let her pass.”
Ms. Peritz chose to move into a seniors residence at the age of 90, and took full advantage of all the activities – choir, tai chi, movie night, Super Quiz and happy hour, where she would sip a Dubonnet, surrounded by her new circle of friends.
When residents were confined to their rooms during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Peritz didn’t let that deter her. She religiously followed a Jane Fonda workout on the television in her room.
She took an exercise class at her residence two days before she died.
Ms. Peritz leaves her four children and four grandchildren.Courtesy of family
Unlike most grandparents, who counsel their grandchildren to be wise about money, to save it and not waste it, Ms. Peritz insisted it not be invested, but rather spent on something they would enjoy, Mr. Feist said at her funeral.
“She felt that her childhood had been taken from her and she wanted us to have a full life,” he said.
She encouraged all four grandsons – Eric, Darron, Jonathan and Daniel – to feel deeply, even if it was painful, as life can often be.
Every year at Passover, she lit candles in memory of her dear friends and extended family who were among the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Last year, she lit an extra candle for the childless couple who adopted her first baby at birth and raised him to become the man Ms. Peritz would be reunited with 75 years later and just two years before she died.
That joyful reunion, she said before her death, was the reason she had lived so long, and once the two met, her life was complete.
“We both felt a miracle had occurred,” David Rothberg said at her memorial. “And for me the miracle wasn’t just that I had reconnected with my mother, the miracle was that my mother was Irena Peritz.”
Ms. Peritz leaves her four children and four grandchildren.
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