Father's Day Part III: A tale of two fathers

Kuba (Jacob) Weisbrod (on my right in the photo) was Sarah’s father (Passed away 2016). When I first met him he had a little (~ 15 foot frontage) variety store selling candy, cigarettes, toys, magazines and some foodstuffs and toiletries. The store was on the West side of Yonge St. in Toronto, south of Wellesley. Easy to miss even if you walked on the same side of the street, except for at Halloween, when there were scary masks in the window.

Kuba and his wife Ella tended the store from 07:00 until 23:00 seven days a week 364 days per year (closed Yom Kipur). They were raising 2 daughters. The older was Sarah, who was about 16 years old when I met her. I was age 19. The Weisbrods were introduced to the Fishers by my aunt Rella (Isaac’s wife [[more on Isaac in another post]], and a distant cousin of Ella) when they moved from Yonge St., where they lived above their variety store, into a house on Marianfeld Ave, which was on the same side of the street but 5 lots north from our house .

In keeping with the father theme of this blog series, a few words about Kuba. In 1941 Kuba had a wife and young son and was living in the city of Tarnopol, in what was then in Poland. As part of the then secret Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression agreement between Hitler and Stalin, Russia invaded and gobbled up Eastern Poland on September 17, 1939 about 2 weeks after Hitler invaded the western part of Poland. Kuba was soon arrested in a sweep by the Russian police and charged with being a capitalist. The evidence placed before the court was incontrovertible: Kuba’s father had owned a successful store selling leather goods, and was a Jew. As there was no credible defense, the trial was over in what Kuba thinks was about 10 minutes. Sentence: 20 years at hard labor in Siberia—a common sentence demanded by the state in all such cases, so requiring little deliberation by the judge. (For many other examples of such summary trials (with or without interrogations and torture, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”).

After weeks packed into an unheated train with virtually no food, Kuba arrived, with 3000 others at Workuta, (or Vorkuta Wikepedia ), a labor camp north of the Arctic Circle. He was to work in the coal mine. The mine was a shoddy death trap. The equipment was primitive or non existent. The guards were brutal. The cold was relentless and dominated every minute of the day or night. Kuba said he knew when it was below -45 C because at that temperature pee freezes before it hits the ground. He had few clothes, he stuffed paper under his coat (paper was hard to get as newspapers were forbidden and unprinted paper was forbidden) hoping in vain for some insulation; He had torn gloves and boots that were totally permeable to the cold and wet. The food was basically gruel with sawdust and garbage, and when lucky, a few insects or a rat were in the soup for some protein. The mortality rate in this socialist paradise was such that in 3 months all but about 300 men had died from work-related trauma, beatings, suicide, freezing and starvation. By 3 months since arrival, there were only 300 survivors (a mortality of 50% per month) but none of these could be beaten into producing any more useful work. About this time there arrived another contingent of 3000 men thoughtfully gathered, mostly through random arrests, forced confessions, orchestrated by the obliging police and courts of justice all over the USSR.

Of the 300 survivors, Kuba said, most were taken out of the mine and spread out on the floor in one of the buildings in town. A doctor and several nurses went from man to man. The doctor would roll a man over with his foot to face up or occasionally bend down and look in his eyes or try to rouse him. He then pronounced which prisoner was expected to live and which was too far gone and should be left to die. When the doctor stood over Kuba, he heard the doctor tell the nurses that ‘this one will soon die’. Kuba would tell us that he remembers falling asleep and dreaming that his father, who had previously died of kidney disease, came over to him, sat on his cot, and told him “Don’t worry Kuba. You will live.” Indeed Kuba survived that and eventually made it to Canada. (The balance of the story in USSR and his escape will be presented in a different post.)

Kuba’s wife and son did not survive. Kuba literally walked from Russia to Israel, where he married Ella, an Auschwitz survivor, and started a second family consisting of 2 girls, the oldest of which was Sarah. The family came to Canada under family reunification program. Ella’s sister Gutcha Lederman, who was her only surviving relative, sponsored the family to come to Toronto. Kuba worked as a gas station attendant, filling cars with gas so the drivers can remain warm in their cars. He lived frugally and used the proceeds to buy the little variety store on Yonge St where he worked 16 hours per day 7 days a week. The Weisbrod family eventually were able to put a down payment on a house on Marianfeld Ave in North York.

When I was growing up in Toronto, my father was working as a house painter in his own company. (That story of arrival in Canada and early work will be presented in a blog post elsewhere). He and Rachella bought a house on Marianfeld Ave. in about 1958 when Lawrence Ave and Duffrin were 2-lane country roads with ditches along side. My daddy was up every day at 4:30 a.m., and went out into the garage to mix up the colors for the jobs to be done that day. He had cut a hole in the heating duct that was crossing the garage so that the paint would not freeze. (See family carbon monoxide story). The painters would back up the driveway and load their trunks with paint cans, brushes, rollers, tarpaulins, ladders, and take off to the various jobs. After they were gone, my father drove around buying paint and supplies (at Benjamin Moore store on College Street West of Spadina Ave.—See Blog story about my father and the Scott Mission), and quoting on jobs. He also drove around to the jobs making sure the painters did not run out of paint and supplies. When one of them would not show up, or walked away mid job, (mostly to take another job where he was offered cash) my father would have to hurry over and complete the jobs himself, sometimes working all night so some tenant can move in in the morning. With this work he supported our home and paid for the university education of his 3 children: me, Harold, and Sylvia.

I knew something of my father’s pre-war life, which was idyllic by his telling. Daddy refused to speak of his war experience. Even my mother knew little. David (on my left in the photo) apparently had spent time in some incarceration doing farm work (?) and then worked in some sort of forced labor during the war. We don’t know what kind. Somehow he survived to the end of the war. When found by the allies, he was totally emaciated, weighing, he thinks, about 35 Kg. When the liberating troops, not knowing better, fed him, he went into complete liver and kidney failure. He apparently was sent to a hospital by the American liberators, where he remained for about 1 year before he would recover and be sufficiently rehabilitated so he could even walk. In about 2015 my sister Sylvia, Harold and myself hired an archivist to see if they could find any information about my father. We were shocked to find that he had a wife and a little girl, Elsa, that would have been about 6 years old in 1939. Neither survived. David then met my mother Rachella Berneman at a post war wedding and they themselves wed in 1947. I was their statement that they insist on salvaging a normal life (should perhaps be ‘normal’ in quotes). I was born in 1948.

So: David Fisher’s son Joe (me) met and fell in love with Kuba’s daughter Sarah when Kuba moved his family to Marianfeld in around 1968.

They married June 20, 1971.

That year, June 20 was Father’s Day.

Somehow, quite fitting.