The Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada

The Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada presents

Anna Heilman
Holocaust Survivor, Heroine, Author

Sunday, November 9, 2003 at 5 PM, Jerusalem Room, Bathurst Jewish Community Centre, 4588 Bathurst St. (between Sheppard and Finch).

Anna Heilman is a native of Warsaw, Poland. She survived the Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Ms. Heilman took part in the destruction of a gas chamber/crematorium in Auschwitz. Her memoirs were published as Never Far Away, an award winning book based on more than 40 years of writing. She resides in Ottawa from where she travels widely to speak about her life. The Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation is proud to sponsor Anna Heilman in conjunction with Holocaust Education Week.

Ms. Heilman's heroic exploits are remembered in an exhibition that will take place at the Koffler Centre of the Arts from November 2 - 11 2003. This is in the same location as the lecture. The exhibition is entitled Women In the Holocaust: Faces of Resistance. It depicts the experiences and role of Jewish women in the Shoah. It is a travelling project developed by the Moreshet Holocaust Research and Study Centre, Givat Haviva, Israel.

We invite you to hear Anna Heilman and to see the exhibition.

Recommended Books

Never Far Away. The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman
by Anna Heilman, edited by Sheldon Schwartz
University of Calgary Press, October 2001
6 x 9 in., 160 pages, 7 b/w illustrations, 2 maps
ISBN 1552380408

Never Far Away provides a unique insight into the courage and ingenuity of the rebels who worked in an armament factory and how they smuggled gunpowder back to their barracks to destroy the gas chambers. The diary's entries reflect an immediacy and a self-conscious awareness of the enormity of what was happening. At the same time, they present the point of view of someone utterly and ultimately powerless to influence this larger course of events. Never Far Away documents the loss of childhood innocence and the triumph of human spirit against crushing oppression. The book contains a foreword by historians Juergen Doerr and Dieter Buse and an afterword by Joel Prager.