{"id":193307,"date":"2026-09-02T20:39:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T20:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/193307\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T20:39:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T20:39:11","slug":"holocaust-orphan-saul-reichert-built-a-prosperous-life-in-edmonton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/193307\/","title":{"rendered":"Holocaust orphan Saul Reichert built a prosperous life in Edmonton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Jewish community, showing a remarkable resilience and positive attitude that continued throughout his life. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t look back, he looked forward and lived in the present,\u201d 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\u2019s death. \u201cHe was in every sense a part of our family. He was like an older brother to me.\u201d <\/p>\n

Mr. Reichert, who died in Toronto on July 24 at 95, never stopped being thankful for his chance at a new life. \u201cTo come to a country like Canada was really the difference between day and night,\u201d he recalled in a 1985 video testimony produced for the Jewish Archives and Historical Society of Edmonton and Northern Alberta.<\/p>\n

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Saul Reichert at age 17 in Pegnitz, Germany, in 1947.Photo courtesy of the Reichert family<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a very optimistic person, stubbornly optimistic,\u201d said Bonny Reichert, a Toronto food writer and the youngest of Mr. Reichert\u2019s four daughters, who chronicled her father\u2019s life in her own memoir, How to Share an Egg, published in 2025. \u201cHe didn\u2019t expect to survive and when he did, he saw it as a marvellous second chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing things in a positive way and thinking things would get better soon, that was Saul to a T,\u201d said his eldest daughter, Rochelle, who recalled that her father didn\u2019t dwell on what he lived through as a child and teenager. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to burden his children and didn\u2019t want us to experience what he had,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s half-sister, was the daughter of Betzalel\u2019s first wife, who had died. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 1940, the family was forced into Pabianice\u2019s 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. \u201cPeople were sitting in the streets waiting to die and nobody could help them,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Reacting to Saul\u2019s inherent charm, a supervisor named Mr. Sharp took a liking to the boy and found a job for Saul\u2019s mother distributing food, giving the family better access to scarce rations. \u201cAll of a sudden, our fate in the ghetto became better,\u201d Saul said.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cFor a diamond ring, you\u2019d be lucky if you got two or three loaves of bread,\u201d Saul said.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cAll of a sudden, they separated the women and the men.\u201d It was the last time Saul saw his mother and sisters.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could see the crematorium in the background,\u201d Mr. Reichert recalled in 1985. \u201cThe people who looked sick and were very thin went to the other side and were never seen again.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI was so excited. I\u2019m going to live. I\u2019m not going to die,\u201d he recalled later.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When he arrived in Edmonton, the Margolus family helped Mr. Reichert get started, finding him a job at Teddy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Reichert bought a couple of other luncheonettes and opened the Carousel, a 250-seat dining room and bar. He expanded Teddy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 2004, the Reicherts endowed the Toby and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture at the University of Alberta\u2019s Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. The series features an annual lecture at the university by a prominent scholar of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Though he didn\u2019t 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. \u201cLook at the newsreels of 1933 to 1944. They were cheering him [Hitler] on,\u201d Mr. Reichert said in his video testimonial, blaming the German people for failing to rebel against the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere must never be a nation who can do what the Germans did and get away with it,\u201d he said in the video. <\/p>\n

Mr. Reichert leaves his daughters, Rochelle, Jerell, Adell and Bonny, as well as 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. <\/p>\n

You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Saul Reichert was a participant in the War Orphans Project, which ultimately saw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[52,484,3009],"class_list":["post-193307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-edmonton","tag-noastack","tag-obituary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}