We lived in barracks, sleeping on top of each other. There were no washrooms. I was lucky, because when I got scarlet fever, my mother was working in the infirmary, and she moved me every time the Nazi doctors came to inspect the ward. I am sure that if they had found out, I would have been put to death.
When we heard that people were needed to dig ditches at other labour camps, my mother was the first to volunteer. Something warned her to leave Stutthof. She lied about my age, and since I looked presentable -- I had bosom and was dressed up -- we went.
I was a good worker, but I don't know how we lived through the Lithuanian winters. We slept in little tents with straw. Somehow, we survived.
Come January 1945, the Allies were approaching Lithuania. So the Nazis ordered us to march. We walked for days and days. My mother saved my life again; she kept pushing me on. If I had fallen, I would have been finished. One morning, when we woke up, it was quiet. The Germans had fled and left us behind!
A Russian soldier arrived on a white horse to liberate us. The women gathered around him and pulled him down. When he gave us all food, my mother ran around yelling, "Don't eat a lot!" Many women died because they ate too much. They had not eaten much for years!
The Russians took us towards Lithuania, where we could find out if anyone else had survived. My mother had lost everybody, since it was a Nazi policy to kill all the people living in small towns. We went to Lodz, Poland, where we were told that they were making lists for people who survived, to see if my father was still alive. It was then that we found out that he had given up hope after we had been split up, thinking that we would have been killed at Stutthof. The irony was that he had died the same week in January, 1945, that we were liberated.
So nobody but my mother and I had survived. All we had left were the uncles and aunts who had moved to other countries before the war.
We were sent to a displaced persons camp in Badgastein, Austria, where my mother worked as a nurse, I started to study. In the mean time my uncle in Montreal tried to push the paperwork through so we could immigrate to Canada. We lived in the camp until March 21, 1948, when finally, our papers arrived and we left for Montreal and a new life.
Once we arrived, we moved in with my mother's sister. My mother wanted to work in the hospital, but her qualifications were not recognized by the hospitals. She was so upset, she went back to school and studied nursing at McGill at the age of 39. She got her licence in January 1952, and worked for 25 years at the Jewish General in Montreal.
Meanwhile, she met my stepfather, a painter and a wonderful man, and they fell in love and married in April 1949.
I went to public school in Montreal. I loved books and I studied day and night. And we started a relatively normal life. Except, I never slept at a girlfriend's house, nor was I allowed to ride a bicycle and I never went skating, because "God forbid, something could happen to me!"
When I was nearly 20, I married a wonderful man -- it was the first time that I disobeyed my mother -- and I started a job as an accountant in Montreal.
By age 28, I had four children. One day, when the youngest was in kindergarten, the teacher asked me what I was doing for a living. She exclaimed that I should be a teacher because it was evident that I was a natural. So I went to night school, and I started to teach at the Y.
During the Lapointe turmoil in 1972, we moved to Toronto. Now I have been teaching for 22 years here at Associated Hebrew Day School. I am trying to teach kids to love each other, to hope and to be nice.
I never spoke about the Holocaust. I never told my kids or my husband about it. I pretended that it didn't happen.
It took me until 1989, and a visit to the Anne Frank Exhibition at Ontario Place, to decide to tell my story. I realized that the children have to know what happened. I tell them that Hitler came to power with one vote, so it is important to vote. I tell them that life goes on, and you have to look at the bright side. I tell them to tell their own children when they are older, so that it never happens again. I think that I might have reached some of them."
Faiga Libman teaches at Associated Hebrew Day School, and has 10 grandchildren. Her mother lives in the Baycrest Home for the Aged.
We lived in barracks, sleeping on top of each other. There were no washrooms. I was lucky, because when I got scarlet fever, my mother was working in the infirmary, and she moved me every time the Nazi doctors came to inspect the ward. I am sure that if they had found out, I would have been put to death.
