UBC creative writing professor Timothy Taylor knew his mother Ursula, who was half Jewish, had to hide from the Nazis in Germany during the Second World War.
But she rarely spoke about how she and her family survived the Holocaust.
“I think that survivors each have their own reasons for talking or not talking about their experiences. And in my mother’s case, the reasons for not talking were probably mostly about protecting her children from the pain of what she went through, the desire to move on, to create a new life in North America,” said Taylor.
When his parents passed away, Taylor learned his mother had held onto boxes of letters that his grandfather Felix Kuppenheim had exchanged with his great uncle Hans Kuppenheim after both men fled Nazi Germany during the war.
“My grandfather fled with the only visa that the family was able to get, which was to Ecuador. And he was forced to leave his two daughters, my mother and my aunt, and my grandmother behind. So my mother, her sister and her mother spent the war in Germany. And for my mother, that meant spending about a year in hiding during 1944,” said Taylor.
When he was in Ecuador, Kuppenheim faithfully wrote to his brother in New York about the war. That correspondence that was kept for decades in the boxes in Ursula Taylor’s attic.
“My grandfather’s record has a fantastic degree of detail about how he escaped, including his passport with all of the visa stamps, as well as a very detailed itinerary, postcards that he sent along the way, tickets, receipts from various stops that he made,” said Taylor.
The professor knew the documents had historical value.
“I contacted an archive appraiser that I knew, and he looked at the material and convinced me that it immediately had to be given to an archive who could preserve it properly because it was just in banker’s boxes. So that’s where the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center came in. I was very honoured to be able to give them these papers, to be part of their permanent archive,” said Taylor.
The UBC Digitization Centre is now in the process of individually scanning all 10,000 pages. The project should be finished by August and will be made available to Holocaust researchers around the world.
“Stories of this kind, in all of their details, as difficult as they may be to look at closely, are very important resources for people to process, to connect with personally, and to allow their empathy for others in positions of suffering around the world,” said Taylor.
Unlike many families torn apart by war, his grandparents were able to find each other again.
“The family was reunited in 1948, the International Refugee Organization moved my mother and my aunt from Germany to Ecuador. That’s why the family settled in Ecuador, where I still have cousins to this day,” he said.
Ursula Taylor moved to West Vancouver in 1965. Her son’s not sure how long the boxes of documents sat in his parents’ attic, but now that they’re being preserved, the Kuppenheims’ journey from Nazi Germany to Ecuador and West Vancouver will never be forgotten.
