Mania Kay

Born in 1920 in Oswiecim, Poland, or Auschwitz in German, Mania Kay and her family of Polish Jews suffered the persecution of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. In August 1943, she and her family were herded into the Auschwitz Concentration Camp where she was separated from her family. They all perished in the extermination camp. Although beaten and starved, Mania survived, and was part of the Death March from Auschwitz to the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp where she was finally liberated on March 15, 1945. She married Moishe Yakov, and together they emigrated to Canada with their two daughters. They settled in Kitchener in 1948 where they opened a tailor shop. In the mid-1980s when Neo-Nazi groups and Holocaust deniers were proliferating, Mania felt challenged and compelled to tell people about her experiences in the death camps. She established the Waterloo Holocaust Education Committee, and provided workshops for local students, inviting Holocaust survivors from Toronto and elsewhere to tell their stories, and of course, she told her own.

Mania was part of film director Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation where 55,000 Holocaust survivors related their experiences on what became a four-hour DVD. Mania felt that it was imperative that she educate young people about tolerance, respect, and dignity. When she founded the Waterloo Holocaust Education Committee, she did so with a heavy heart since telling her story brought back the horrors of the Holocaust – the pain, trauma, hurt and longing for her family. She wanted people to understand that a tragedy of this magnitude should never happen again. One teacher who invited Mania to speak to his students wrote, “You could see and feel the pain as she was talking about the terrible things that had been inflicted upon her and her family. It was heartbreaking but illuminating for the students. It showed them what happened when hate was left unchecked, when prejudice and racism are encouraged, and when humanity is diminished.”

Despite everything that Mania had endured, she retained “ceaseless, uncompromising humanity” and never lost her belief in the potential goodness of people. Mania Kay over the years received many awards for her work including the Paul Harris Fellowship Award from the Rotary Club of Kitchener Grand River, and the Zonta Women of Achievement Award. Her legacy includes the Waterloo Region Holocaust Education Committee whose mandate is: Remembering Our Past, Honouring Our Present, Ensuring Our Future. On her death in 2012, an article in The Record said that Mania Kay died “in the fulness of years, true to her faith and after performing an essential service to Canada and the world. We have now lost a living link to one of the darkest chapters of human history. We must never lose her message of the need for good citizens to denounce and resist evil.”