Saul Reichert was a participant in the War Orphans Project, which ultimately saw 1,123 Jewish survivors under age 18 immigrate to Canada.Bonny Reichert/Supplied
In January of 1948, Saul Reichert landed at Pier 21 in Halifax, alone in the world. He was 17, with one English pound and a few U.S. dollars in his pocket. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and had lost his mother and five sisters in the Holocaust. There was no question of returning to his hometown in Poland.
Mr. Reichert was a participant in the War Orphans Project, the product of an agreement between the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian government that ultimately saw 1,123 Jewish survivors under the age of 18 immigrate to Canada. It was also the first crack in the notorious Canadian immigration policy that had shut out Jews fleeing the Nazis before and during the Second World War.
Most of the orphans were sponsored by Jewish families in Montreal and Toronto, but Saul was one of 28 headed for Alberta, travelling across the country to Edmonton, where he was welcomed by a sponsoring family. Within two years, he owned a lunch counter and spoke English, launching a successful business career in restaurants and real estate and becoming an active member of Edmonton’s Jewish community, showing a remarkable resilience and positive attitude that continued throughout his life.
“He didn’t look back, he looked forward and lived in the present,” said David Margolus, an Edmonton lawyer whose parents sponsored young Saul on his arrival in the city in 1948. Mr. Margolus was born two years later and Mr. Reichert became a presence in his life that continued until Mr. Reichert’s death. “He was in every sense a part of our family. He was like an older brother to me.”
Mr. Reichert, who died in Toronto on July 24 at 95, never stopped being thankful for his chance at a new life. “To come to a country like Canada was really the difference between day and night,” he recalled in a 1985 video testimony produced for the Jewish Archives and Historical Society of Edmonton and Northern Alberta.
Saul Reichert at age 17 in Pegnitz, Germany, in 1947.Photo courtesy of the Reichert family
“He was a very optimistic person, stubbornly optimistic,” said Bonny Reichert, a Toronto food writer and the youngest of Mr. Reichert’s four daughters, who chronicled her father’s life in her own memoir, How to Share an Egg, published in 2025. “He didn’t expect to survive and when he did, he saw it as a marvellous second chance.”
“Seeing things in a positive way and thinking things would get better soon, that was Saul to a T,” said his eldest daughter, Rochelle, who recalled that her father didn’t dwell on what he lived through as a child and teenager. “He didn’t want to burden his children and didn’t want us to experience what he had,” she said.
Shlomo Reichert was born on Dec. 17, 1930, in Pabianice, a small city adjacent to Lodz in central Poland, the only son of Betzalel Reichert and his wife, the former Udel Rotblat, who also had four daughters together. A fifth girl, Saul’s half-sister, was the daughter of Betzalel’s first wife, who had died.
The family owned a paint-supply shop and lived a middle-class life, though they were affected by the Depression. In the video, Mr. Reichert recounts that he had a wonderful childhood, surrounded by a warm and loving family. That childhood ended in 1939, with the death of his father from natural causes and the Nazi invasion of Poland. He was 8.
In 1940, the family was forced into Pabianice’s Jewish ghetto, where he was nevertheless able to continue some schooling. Two years later, they were forcibly sent to the ghetto in Lodz where conditions were much more difficult. There was no school and hardly any food. “People were sitting in the streets waiting to die and nobody could help them,” he recalled.
Then Saul managed to get work as a sorter in a church where the authorities had sent pillows, duvets and other bedding taken from Jewish families. Workers like Saul would slash them open, and then separate the feathers and down, which were ultimately shipped off to Germany.
Reacting to Saul’s inherent charm, a supervisor named Mr. Sharp took a liking to the boy and found a job for Saul’s mother distributing food, giving the family better access to scarce rations. “All of a sudden, our fate in the ghetto became better,” Saul said.
There was another advantage to the sorting job. Desperate Jews would occasionally hide jewellery or cash which would emerge when the bedding was ripped open and could be traded for something of immediate value. “For a diamond ring, you’d be lucky if you got two or three loaves of bread,” Saul said.
In the fall of 1944, the Lodz ghetto was emptied. Saul and his family were loaded into rail cars and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arriving at the camp, they were surrounded by armed German guards screaming at them, accompanied by dogs. “All of a sudden, they separated the women and the men.” It was the last time Saul saw his mother and sisters.
“You could see the crematorium in the background,” Mr. Reichert recalled in 1985. “The people who looked sick and were very thin went to the other side and were never seen again.” But Saul, despite his small stature, was nevertheless selected for forced labour and ended up in a sub-work camp called Gleiwitz, where he hauled railway ties.
Mr. Reichert, pictured in 1947, leaves his daughters, Rochelle, Jerell, Adell and Bonny, as well as 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.Photo courtesy of the Reichert family
As the Red Army advanced in early 1945, the Nazis sent the remaining concentration camp inmates north on the infamous death marches. Saul and a cousin ended up on a train that took them to Germany, where they were liberated by U.S. soldiers in May of 1945. Hiding in a barn, he was initially skeptical but when he heard the troops speaking English, he was elated. “I was so excited. I’m going to live. I’m not going to die,” he recalled later.
Saul survived over the next two years working in a kitchen for American troops and made a brief foray into cigarette smuggling. Then he and his cousin heard about the opportunity to get a visa. He told officials he wanted to go to New York, not knowing he would be heading for Canada. His cousin, who was already 18, was excluded from the Canadian program.
When he arrived in Edmonton, the Margolus family helped Mr. Reichert get started, finding him a job at Teddy’s Lunch, a deli and grocery store known for its corned beef sandwiches and chili con carne. Working seven days a week, he ended up buying the business two years later with help from the Margolus family. He soon paid off the loan.
Mr. Reichert bought a couple of other luncheonettes and opened the Carousel, a 250-seat dining room and bar. He expanded Teddy’s and with partners bought stakes in other restaurants and a hotel. As Edmonton grew, Mr. Reichert bought farmland in nearby Beaumont and became a house builder and developer. A street in the town bears his name.
Mr. Reichert married in 1956 and with his wife, Toby, had four girls. As teens, the sisters ended up working the cash or acting as a hostess or server at one of the restaurants.
Saul and Toby were keen card players, particularly bridge, and Saul enjoyed poker as well. When they became more prosperous, they began to winter in Arizona but still felt most at home in Edmonton. After retiring, they eventually moved to Toronto, to be closer to their daughters. Mrs. Reichert died in 2021.
In 2004, the Reicherts endowed the Toby and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture at the University of Alberta’s Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. The series features an annual lecture at the university by a prominent scholar of the Holocaust.
Though he didn’t harp on it, Mr. Reichert did have his views on the causes of the Holocaust. He lay the blame firmly at the feet of the German people. “Look at the newsreels of 1933 to 1944. They were cheering him [Hitler] on,” Mr. Reichert said in his video testimonial, blaming the German people for failing to rebel against the Nazi regime.
“There must never be a nation who can do what the Germans did and get away with it,” he said in the video.
Mr. Reichert leaves his daughters, Rochelle, Jerell, Adell and Bonny, as well as 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
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