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Dr. Goldberg, born Mendel Gwiazda in 1942, was an orphan.

“I looked at the scrapbook a couple of times over the years and I would say, ‘This is interesting,’ ” he says. “But there wasn’t a hope in hell that I could trace anything more about my past. Who was I going to ask?”

It is Holocaust education week, and the lesson of Dr. Goldberg — a respected 72-year-old physician who still puts in a solid work day at Toronto East General Hospital where we met this week — is, perhaps, that the past has a curious way of finding people, even those who don’t go looking for it.

The young Mel Goldberg didn’t look back. He went to university, got an engineering degree and a medical degree, and then a job at the hospital. He married, had kids and built a life. When he was asked about being a Holocaust survivor, his response was, “So what?”

He had no story to tell, or so he thought. No family photographs to point to. Nothing. Nobody. His parents gave him up to save him, an act of heartbreaking courage. They died. He lived.

And looking back, he could only ever see things in the abstract. There was an outline, but the picture was blank.

“I wasn’t one to dwell on the past,” he says. “But it was difficult.”

‘There wasn’t a hope in hell that I could trace anything more about my past. Who was I going to ask?’

It is more complicated now, this picture. Happier. Braver. Complete. A few years ago, he received a phone call from a woman, Her name was Lilka Elbaum and her parents came from the same village as his. They were among the 37 Jews who survived in Biala Rawska, out of a population of 1,500.