One evening, on the cusp of my 11th birthday, my little-girl naivete escaped, and I approached my grandmother: “Nana Vera, will you tell me about the Holocaust?”

Vera Szüsz Martin Gold, left, with her granddaughter Kortney Shapiro.

She did not cry, nor did she redirect my question. With the utmost of grace, my grandmother told me of her childhood: about her days growing up in Banska Bystrica, a town of 13,000 in what is today central Slovakia, and of how her blissful days soon became hell on earth. That is when I realized that my grandmother is a survivor.

A number of synonyms are suggested for the word “survivor.” The list includes “debris,” “scrap” and “leftover.” Is it therefore justifiable to label my own grandmother as such? The word “survivor” differs in meaning for everyone; however, I must argue that there is a significant difference between those who have persevered through an awful episode in their lives and a survivor of the Shoah. Between 1939 and 1945, nearly 11 million people were brutally murdered in Europe, and therefore, anyone who was able to escape death during the time of Adolf Hitler’s reign is a survivor.

As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I have realized that not only is the retelling of the individual stories imperative, but listening to these stories is of the utmost importance. As I wrote this piece, I sifted through a Ziploc bag containing cue cards from the many lectures that my grandmother Vera has delivered over the years. I could set aside my values as a writer and merely recite the details of my grandmother’s imprisonment and concentration camp experiences, but I will not. What I will do is ask this question: What in fact does it mean to be a Survivor?

I, for one, cannot fathom what my grandmother and her family experienced during the war. To have lived a life of leisure, to have thrived in a town where everyone knew your father’s name and where summer weekends were spent at Lake Balaton. To have one day awakened and had it all ripped away from you, without any explanation aside from fact that you were Jewish.

Many ask what the true definition of a survivor is. For me, my grandmother Vera is a survivor of an event in history that not only annihilated more than six million Jews but also redefined a term so commonly used in our colloquial speech. Survivors endured a dark historical period when man lost his mind and placed his fellow brothers in furnaces to burn them into dust.

Tell me that my grandmother is not a survivor, and I will show you the mountain of human ashes in Majdanek. Tell me that my grandmother is not a survivor when you stand inside a chamber once used to suffocate hundreds of thousands of innocents, with walls stained green from Zyklon B. Tell me that my grandmother, Vera Szüsz Martin Gold, is not a survivor after losing her own mother in a camp, just days after liberation. My grandmother was able to survive, along with her sister and her father, Kornel, for whom I am named.

This year marks Holocaust Education Week’s 29th anniversary. In 2006, I travelled to Poland on the March of the Living, an organized trip with my peers. Upon arriving at the Majdanek death camp, we were brought into a small room. We were standing inside hell – a gas chamber once used to kill hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Although I did not see the camps where members of my family were prisoners – Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, all located in Germany – I was honoured to have read my grandmother’s story of survival while standing in a forest clearing that had once been Treblinka, a camp in Poland where only one inmate is rumoured to have survived.

During my final year of high school, I felt the need to bring Holocaust education to life, after coming to terms with the fact that my Jewish high school had yet to have a week dedicated to Shoah awareness to coincide with the city-run events. This year, I am fortunate to have a position in Hillel once again that allows me to advocate to students across the city of Montreal, explaining the importance of Holocaust remembrance, and to have many students come out to our events, including a special Shabbat dinner, where my grandmother will be attending for her third consecutive year.

With the realization that survivors are getting older, many of us are coming to terms with the importance of hearing their testimonials first hand.

“I always talk about this with young readers. [There is this] window of opportunity and it is a window that is slowly closing in on us because it is an aging population, and most of the survivors that I speak to these days are probably in their 80s,” author Kathy Kacer says. “The thought that those first-hand accounts of survivors could in fact be gone in a few years to me is so startling, and more than that, it is about their voices being gone.”

Kacer, who has written numerous books on the Holocaust shares with me a deep connection to the subject, as both her parents survived the war.

“Actually having the opportunity to sit down with these survivors and talk and hear their voice… that’s what becomes so memorable,” Kacer says, following with a few words of encouragement to me: “Hopefully, Kortney, one day, you will be the one writing the book.”

Continue asking questions. Continue reading the thousands of testimonies. Continue reaching out to those who may not know what you know, for soon the voice of the survivor will be but an echo in our minds, and it is our role as the next generation of world leaders to commit to the retelling of the survivor’s story.

My grandmother Vera is my story, and we have only just begun the first half…

Kortney Shapiro is vice-president of programming and PR with Hillel McGill.