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Fania Fainer.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
When Sandy Fainer was growing up in Toronto in the 1950s, she loved reading Nancy Drew mystery books and channelled her admiration for the girl detective by conducting her own investigations in the family’s suburban bungalow.
“I was snooping through my mother’s underwear and found it,” she recalled. It was what her mother, Fania Fainer, called in Yiddish “the little book,” a tiny heart-shaped autograph book covered in purple fabric, with a letter F stitched onto the cover.
When Sandy opened the booklet, it emerged origami-like with paper petals of penciled greetings in Polish, German, French and Hebrew, languages she didn’t understand. When Sandy asked her mother about her discovery, “She just yelled at me and told me that I was not to touch the little book and that it was precious,” she told The Globe in an interview. “Of course, I went back to look at it endlessly.”
Cherished privately over the decades, the booklet turned out to be one of the most remarkable artifacts of the Holocaust, a handmade birthday card signed by 19 young women working as slave labourers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 to celebrate the 20th birthday of a beloved fellow worker and friend.
That friend, Fania Fainer, died in Toronto on Aug. 27 at the age of 100, a Holocaust survivor whose tiny personal memento, dubbed the “Heart from Auschwitz” has become a symbol of resilience and friendship that still resonates more than 80 years after it was created.
“The only thing I had left after the war was the little book,” Mrs. Fainer told The Globe in 2010. “It was something close to my heart.”
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The Heart from Auschwitz, a memento signed by 19 women at the Nazi death camp, was smuggled by a former prisoner into Canada.John Morstad for The Globe and Mail
The heart, which now holds pride of place at Montreal’s Holocaust Museum, also is the star of a documentary, The Heart of Auschwitz, produced 15 years ago, and the subject of the children’s book Fania’s Heart, by Anne Renaud.
Fania Landau was born in Bialystok, Poland on Dec. 12, 1924, the middle of three children of Jacob Landau and his wife, Sarah Landau. Jacob had a job in a workshop and was active in the Bund, a democratic socialist movement of secular Jews, activists who ran their own schools where the teaching was primarily in Yiddish.
When the Nazis conquered Poland, the Jews of Bialystok were crowded into a ghetto. Fania’s father managed to arrange for the teenaged Fania to escape the ghetto and get a job in a nearby spa town. But Fania’s efforts to find a refuge for her brother ultimately failed after she was accused of being a Jew by a young boy on the street and she was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp near Danzig and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Because she was young, healthy and without children, Fania avoided selection for the gas chambers and was sent instead to the Weichsel Union Metallwerke munitions factory onsite, which produced explosives for the German military. It’s there that Fania was presented with the booklet on her birthday in December 1944.
The card was created by her close friend Zlatka Pitluk (née Snajderhauz) who later recalled how the other women – many of whom were still teenagers – helped find the required paper, pencil and scissors while she used a ration of bread to create the paste to glue the thing together. The cover material was cut from Zlatka’s own blouse, all at tremendous risk if the young detainees were caught.
“We weren’t afraid of death,” Zlatka recalled years later an interview. “I wasn’t afraid anymore. I made it because I wanted her [Fania] to have a souvenir. We didn’t know if we were going to survive.”
The messages from the women, some of whom barely knew each other, were surprisingly uplifting. “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” wrote Mania. “May your life be long and sweet,” wrote Mazal. Zlatka survived the war and immigrated to Argentina and she later was in touch with Fania, who attended Zlatka’s daughter’s wedding in Buenos Aires, bringing along the heart. Zlatka died in 2018.
Fania managed to hide the cherished keepsake in her bunk and, even more remarkably, secreted it under her arm during the death march from Auschwitz to Germany in 1945 after the Nazis emptied the camp in the desperate final days of the war. Fania was ultimately liberated by Red Army soldiers.
She returned to Poland and discovered that her entire family had been obliterated. “There was not a trace of anyone,” Sandy said. “She never saw anybody again. Literally nobody.” Through her connections with the Bund, Fania met Aron Fainer, a man from Warsaw who had been in the Polish Army.
They got married and moved to Sweden. Sandy was born in Stockholm in 1948. The young couple loved their time there but Mr. Fainer figured it was too close to Russia for comfort so they migrated to Canada a year later. Sandy says her father initially worked in a garment factory in Toronto but used his accounting skills to ultimately become chief financial officer of a construction and development company.
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Fania Fainer.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Her mother worked occasionally at a shop owned by acquaintances but for her father, it was a matter of pride that Fania did not need to work outside the home. Sandy remembers her mother as a loving, engaging person. “She was wonderfully smart and resourceful and determined to survive,” she said.
“She was warm, she was funny and she really walked the talk,” said Rivka Augenfeld, a longtime family friend.
In the late 1980s, when Sandy was living in London, she found out from her father that Fania had donated the heart to the Montreal Holocaust Museum. They were both shocked. “We had no connection to Montreal at all. For us, it was like giving away the family jewels.”
It turned out that Krisha Starker, the museum’s late director, a friend of Fania who was an Auschwitz survivor herself, had visited Toronto and had dinner with the Fainers. Fania showed her the heart and Ms. Starker convinced her that it was an important artifact that had to be shared with the world.
Sandy said she overcame her early reservations about the donation, particularly after travelling with her children to the museum in Montreal. “It found a really brilliant home. There was no way I could ever have imagined or predicted what they’ve done with it. It’s just been wonderful.”
“It has an exceptional status and role in our museum. It’s spectacular.” said Sarah Fogg, the museum’s head of marketing and communications, who says it’s particularly meaningful for younger audiences, who often have difficulty grasping the horror and scale of the Holocaust. “The heart is a wonderful gateway because it starts with the ideas of solidarity and hope,” she added. Visiting classes are taught the story of the heart and then get to create their own versions.
The heart will also be a focus of the Holocaust Museum’s new $100-million building in downtown Montreal, due to open in 2027. The museum never lends out the original artifact although it has produced a facsimile that does circulate, including to the recent Auschwitz exhibit at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.
Montreal filmmaker Carl Leblanc came across the heart while researching Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Fascinated by the story, he embarked on a two-year quest to track down as many of the card’s signatories as possible. His research led him to the archives at Yad Vashem, the Red Cross and elsewhere, armed often only with first names. He mainly came up empty although he did find and interview a few survivors, including Zlatka.
“To me, the book incarnates, in a very humble way, human dignity,” Mr. Leblanc said when his film was released. “The Nazis wanted to turn people into a number. The book, with its words and letters, is the refusal to be one.”
Sandy said her mother lived an active life but always refused to revisit Auschwitz, a place she called hell. “My parents were adamant that they would never ever set foot in Poland again.”
Mrs. Fainer leaves her daughter, Sandy; son, Harvey; four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
For Fania, in the end, the message of her keepsake was simple. “I wanted to show that in Auschwitz, there were still human beings, and people gave me a present,” she said.
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