Montreal's Jewish community says new museum on The Main is 'a long time coming'

Eva Kuper said it's only due to a "series of miracles" that she's still alive.

She was only two years old when, 80 years ago, she and her mother were forced to board a train leaving the Warsaw ghetto. It was headed to Poland's Treblinka extermination camp.

Somehow, her mother's best friend and cousin, who worked as a guard at the Warsaw ghetto's jail, heard they had been called. She rushed to the train.

"Had she come a minute later or a minute earlier, she would not have seen us," Kuper said. "But she saw my mother holding me, being pushed onto one of the cattle cars. And she ran to that cattle car and started to scream at the top of her lungs that I was her child."

Kuper's mother was permitted to hand her off – hand to hand, person to person – until she was thrown off the train and into the woman's arms.

"And the cattle cars eventually pulled away and nobody on those trains was ever seen again," she said. Including her mother.

Now, Kuper tells that story in schools, knowing, she said, that those students will likely be the last generation to hear the stories from the survivors themselves.

It's why she said the work of the Holocaust Museum of Montreal is so important.

On Monday, the museum announced that it had received $80 million to expand into a new space on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the historic heart of Montreal's Jewish community. 

Kuper, who is on the board of the museum, said the money was a "dream come true" to make sure the reality of the Holocaust, and its impact on the city where so many survivors settled, is never forgotten.

Sarah Fogg, the head of communications for the museum, said it was amazing to know that the museum would soon have a bigger space.

"Demand for our museum's services is really astronomical, and before the pandemic, we really couldn't keep up," she said. "So this project is really a long time coming."

The new building will include holograms of survivors sharing their stories, a new auditorium, a memorial garden, and larger spaces for both permanent and temporary exhibitions.

WATCH | Eva Kuper describes how she survived the Holocaust: