Arriving on Passover, a Holocaust survivor built a life in Montreal

Sarah Engelhard stepped out of Montreal's Windsor Station on the first night of Passover, 1944. Twelve years old and shivering, her thin Spanish clothesshort sleeves and ankle sockswere no match for Canada in March.

"One thing we knew was that this Montreal was not for siestas or fiestas, but for facing cold facts," Engelhard recalled.

But as a young Jewish refugee, it was better than where she came from: a Europe at war, and the Holocaust that would have seen her family killed.

Engelhard's story is one of many highlighted in a new online exhibit by the Montreal Holocaust Museum,Building New Lives. It follows the stories of Jewish refugees brought to Canada during the Second World War, and what happened after they put down roots in Canadian soil.

In an interview with CBC'sDaybreak, she admitted that didn't completely understand what was happening when she was a child, moving from one country to the next in hiding. But Engelhard said she vividly remembers the fear in the air.

"My parents were trying to save me from the horror, but they couldn't," she said. "I didn't understand the reason, of course. But you just know."

Life in hiding in Europe

Some of Engelhard's first memories were in France, where her family lived under false identities. Even with forged papers to support their lives there, Engelhard said they were never really safe.

"They would cordon off streets," she explained. "My cousin, who was living with us, had falsified papers. He was picked up one day was never seen again."

Her family, along with five other Jews, fled over the Pyrenees into Spain.

A locallet them stay in their attic, on a farm in the countryside. One morning, the owner came to them and told them to be ready to leave the next day.

"When she cracked open the door there was a German. A Nazi officer," Engelhard said. The nine of them packed into the German's car, and they drove off, unsure of their future.

"There were three border crossings, at which point the guards would speak in German to our German driver. They asked where were they were going, and he said,'we're taking these Jews to a concentration camp.'"

Instead, the driver drove them to a shelter in Barcelona, where he revealed that he wasn't a Nazi officer at all. It was a ruse to smuggle the Jews safely past the checkpoints, and into the relative safety of the city.

Engelhard would live there illegally for two and a half years until she first heard about a country called Canada.

Crossing the Atlantic to Montreal

In 1944, word came that her family would be granted visas to immigrate to Canada.

Engelhard, twelve years old and out of school for years, didn't know anything about geography. Canada was a mystery to her, and she had no idea what to expect.

They boarded a ship, the Serpa Pinto, for what many at the time called the 'Trip of Hope'a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and away from the war. They docked in Philadelphia, before taking a train north to their final destination: Montreal.

Though the weather was foul, it wasn't the cold that struck her. As she drove to her new home, Engelhard said that she stared out the car window, perplexed at the houses passing her by.

"It was the stairs outdoors: baked on with ice and snow," she laughed. "I couldn't understand why, in weather like this, you would have steps outdoors! That was my introduction to Montreal."

Life after the war

It was difficult to adjust, she said.

"Now, when refugees come, we are prepared for them. We help with language, we help with housing, we help with clothing," she explained.

"[But there was] nothing like it. And it was very difficult."

Engelhard was back to school for the first time in years, but she didn't speak the language, and immediately realized that she was different from her peers. But that didn't stop her from trying to fit in with the other girls.

"When we came here, I tried so desperately...to be like everybody else," she lamented. "I didn't know at the time, but I could not be exactly like everybody else. Because I had experienced what, in my head, in my experience, was miracles: where you're ready to die and you're given life. And so I tried to adjust to a life that was not me."

In the end, she realized that she had to go back to her rootsto the Holocaustto find her identity, and then she was able to move forward.

Engelhard hopes that people take away the spirit in the stories like hers, be it God or the strength of those who are struggling.

"The people who can testify like I do we were we were meant to to be off the face of the earth. But this will never be, because that spirit is the spirit that always wins."

Sarah Engelhard's story, and those of other survivors who arrived in Canada, is available online as part of the Montreal Holocaust Museum's exhibit, Building New Lives. The exhibition is free.