Carry the Torch / A Lasting Legacy (The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs, 56)

In the Krakow-Płaszów concentration camp, both Ephroim Jablon and Sam Weisberg quickly learn of the brutality of the new commandant, Amon Göth, in early 1943. His wrath is near inescapable. By sheer luck, Sam becomes the commandant’s houseboy, a privileged, yet risky, position. Ephroim gets a job in the carpentry workshop, making him similarly "useful," yet he still lives in constant fear. At sixteen years old, both feel like they are walking a tightrope where one wrong move can make them the target of Göth’s unpredictable volatility. They are both ultimately deported and sent on different trajectories ― Ephroim to Auschwitz and the Mauthausen camp system and Sam to the Gross-Rosen concentration camps ―but their experiences in Płaszów are an ever-present reminder that their fates can change in an instant. Carry the Torch and A Lasting Legacy are the different yet parallel stories of two men who, as the sole survivors of their immediate families, must find their own way after the war and decide whether to keep their histories in the past.

Sam Weisberg (né Avraham Gajer) was born in Chorzów, Poland, in 1927. After his liberation in Bergen-Belsen, Sam worked as an interpreter in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, liaising between the British soldiers and the Jewish police. Sam married in 1946 and immigrated to Toronto in 1959. In Toronto, Sam worked at Automatic Laundries Limited and later co-established a company called Promenade Builders. Sam has educated countless students about the Holocaust and was instrumental in establishing a Holocaust memorial monument in Toronto.

Johnny (Ephroim) Jablon (né Jan Rothbaum) was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1927. After the war, Johnny spent three years in the Bindermichl DP camp in Austria before immigrating to Montreal as a war orphan. In Montreal, he worked in the garment industry, graduated from Sir George Williams University with a degree in electronics and then co-established Magic Touch TV Sales & Service. In 2018, Johnny is joining the educational tour March of the Living, which will be his first journey back to Poland since his liberation seventy-three years earlier.