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It is amazing what seeing these things can do to a mind. I knew I was safe here in Canada. But I just couldn’t say I was Jewish

That she was a Jew? That most of her family had been wiped out? That her real name was Miriam Zimmerman and not Mary Gale?

“It is hard for to me to explain why I kept my Jewish identity secret for so long but the thing is, I became paranoid, and it got to the point during the war where I couldn’t even think of being Jewish because being Jewish meant being dead — they were the same thing to me,” says Mary Gale, now living in a seniors home in Toronto’s west end.

“It got to the point that, even today, when I had six teeth pulled out at the dentist I refused the anesthetic because to take a needle was to never come back. And that was what being Jewish meant to me — it meant never coming back.

“I saw so many horrible things. I saw so many dead people. It is amazing what seeing these things can do to a mind. I knew I was safe here in Canada. But I just couldn’t say I was Jewish.”

Not even to her son, Tom, who, after a terrible car accident near Ottawa during his university years went looking for the big answers in life and found religion, converted to Judaism, changed his name to Gershon and moved to Israel where, to this day, he leads an orthodox life. (And where, until recently, his mother had never told him he was Jewish to begin with.)

Keeping her secret was essential, in another time. A Christian woman hid the Zimmermans in Warsaw. Mary, with her hair, her eyes and a phony identity card, was their window to the outside. She shopped, mailed letters, worked in a factory and hid in plain view.