Bialystok to Birkenau
The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki
The testimony of survivors is the ultimate refutation of claims that the Holocaust did not occur. In this profoundly honest Holocaust memoir, Michel Mielnicki takes us from the pleasures and charms of pre-war Polish Jewry (now entirely lost) into some of the darkest places of the twentieth century. One of the few survivors of Birkenau — not a concentration camp but an actual death camp — Mielnicki tells his story with great courage and attention to truthful detail. In his home town of Wasilkow, Poland, he describes how pogroms, which began as small acts of anti-Semitism, led to mass murders and expulsions. Mielnicki also adds new material to the neglected history of Soviet rule in Poland from September 1939 to June 1941. Mielnicki’s account of life in the camps of Birkenau, Buna, Mittelbau-Dora and Belsen is at times harrowing, but the personal qualities that helped him to survive when all human dignity had apparently been erased creates a powerfully redeeming human drama. Bialystok to Birkenau is a co-publication with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Holocaust survivor Michel Mielnicki was born in 1927 in Wasikow, a few kilometers from Bialystok in north-eastern Poland. In 1945, he settled in Paris, where he served his apprenticeship in France's fashion industry. In 1953, he emigrated to Canada with his wife and infant son. Within a short span of time, "Mr Michel," as he soon became known, was one of Canada's premier fur fashion designers, as well as one of his adopted nation's most fervent Holocaust educators. In 1966, the Mielnickis moved from Montreal to Vancouver, where Michel gradually shifted his business interests from fashion to real estate. Holocaust education, however, remained a constant passion in his life.
