Former Winnipegger Bernard Pinsky grew up listening to his father Rubin Pinsky’s stories about his childhood in Poland and his time spent in the forest, where he survived the Holocaust after fleeing a Nazi labor camp in 1942.

“My father’s stories didn’t scare me when I was a kid,” Pinsky says.

“He told me about foraging in the forest, learning what berries and roots he could eat, making baskets and other items from birch bark and twigs , learning animal cries, etc.”

Pinsky, who lives in Vancouver, will speak at the Winnipeg launch of his book, Ordinary, Extraordinary — My Father’s Life (Behind the book), Sunday – the anniversary of Kristallnacht – in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The program will feature a conversation between Pinsky and Belle Jarniewski, executive director of the Jewish Heritage Center. The event is presented by the center in partnership with the Jewish Child and Family Service and the Ronald S. Roadburg Philanthropic Foundation, of which Pinsky, a retired attorney and community leader, is president.

Of his father, a former yeshiva student, Pinsky says: “He was not a particularly successful businessman in Canada, although we did not feel poor; we had what we needed. I saw how hard he worked, how positive he was, how he provided for his family even though he knew neither English nor French when he arrived in Canada in his twenties.

“Although he was an ordinary man, I realized that his life had taken an extremely difficult path, which he overcame to create a normal, ordinary life for himself and his family. »

Pinsky wanted to honor his father, so for his 72nd birthday in 1996, he wrote a manuscript about his life as a gift.

“He was very happy to have received it, but at that time he had a few mini-strokes (TIAs) and I doubt he ever read the entire manuscript,” Pinsky said by mail electronic.

He also sent the manuscript to some relatives, including Melvin Fenson, a Winnipegger and former partner at the Walsh McKay law firm, who had made aliya (immigration of diaspora Jews to Israel) in the 1970s.

“Melvin read the manuscript and said it contained good information about the Holocaust and that Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial museum dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust) might accept it for its archives,” explains Pinsky.

The manuscript was submitted in 1997 and Yad Vashem said it would be included in its catalog, but nothing happened for a decade.

Then, in 2007, Pinsky received a letter from a history professor in Djatlovo, Belarus, who hoped to translate the manuscript into Russian.

It turned out to be the same town that Pinsky’s father had grown up in: Gzetl, Poland, before the war.

“I went to Djatlovo in 2012 and saw both the incredible work that the teacher, a Russian Orthodox woman, and others like her were doing to create memorials to the Jewish community that perished in the Holocaust, and I saw the small museum in this teacher’s house. high school that she had created based on my work.

“She said she did it because she was religious and that preserving the memory of the Jews, who were now all gone, was the right thing to do. »

At the time, Pinsky was a busy law firm attorney and planned to finish the book when he retired. However, at age 67, he took a new job with a charitable foundation that also left him with little free time.

Finally, his wife pointed out that, as it seemed likely that he would work long hours for the rest of his life, the time to finish the book was “now or never.”