Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki

Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro

Ronsdale & Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre

At twenty I didn’t know any­thing. About that time I had a Jewish boyfriend named Alain who lived with his par­ents in a wealthy area of town. I had lived in the sur­burbs all my life and he was only the sec­ond Jew I had ever been friends with. His par­ents spoke French at home so I assumed that they were from France, but it never occurred to me that they might have sur­vived con­cen­tra­tion camps. Years later I read in the news­pa­per that Alain’s father had found the brother he had been sep­a­rated from at Auschwitz fifty years before. It shook me up to have to super­im­pose the grainy pho­tos of con­cen­tra­tion camp sur­vivors that I’d seen in books and mag­a­zines on the man I remem­bered, and to real­ize that the holo­caust was not his­tory but part of the mod­ern world. Now Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro, has written Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki (Ronsdale & Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre). Mielnicki grew up in Bialystock, Poland, a com­mu­nity of Poles, Russians and Germans where even before the war he was sur­rounded by vicious anti-Semitism. Mielnicki lost both his par­ents the day they arrived at Auschwitz , but he and his brother and sis­ter man­aged to sur­vive the war, even though they were sep­a­rated for many years. This is Michel’s story, the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who sur­vived by good luck and con­stant vig­i­lance, even dur­ing his time at Birkenau, a place where “the Nazis had cre­ated a sub­ter­ranean world … inhab­ited by scur­ry­ing, craven lit­tle beings like myself, ruled by dia­bolic, troll-like crea­tures beyond the imag­i­na­tion of even a Tolkien.” The dif­fer­ence between what I knew at twenty and what Michel Mielnicki must have known could fill a whole life.