Eva Kuper

Holocaust Survivor, Hidden Child, Educator, Author and March of the Living Witness

Eva Kuper was born on February 13, 1940, in Warsaw, Poland, to Abram, a chemist, and Fela, who worked in a bank. Before Eva’s first birthday, her family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where they lived for about two years under conditions of fear, hunger, and persecution.

In 1942, during the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, Eva and her mother were rounded up. Her mother, Fela, was deported to Treblinka and murdered, but Eva survived after being passed out of the cattle car and rescued by her cousin Regina. Shortly afterward, Eva’s father escaped the ghetto with his young daughter through the sewers.

Because it was too dangerous for Eva and her father to remain together, he arranged hiding places for her with the help of others. Eva was first placed with Hanka Rembowska, a children’s book illustrator. When Rembowska became ill with tuberculosis, Eva was rescued by Franciscan nuns from a convent in Laski near Warsaw connected to the care of blind children. To escape the bombings in Warsaw, Eva was taken by train to the countryside, to a farmhouse in Bukovina in southern Poland, where Eva spent the rest of the war in hiding, under the care of Sister Klara Jaroszyńska.

After the war, Eva was reunited with her surviving family members. She lived in Poland for several years and immigrated to Canada with her father and stepmother in 1949, settling in Montreal. As a child, Eva had been raised for years in a Catholic environment and only learned of her Jewish identity on the journey to Canada, a revelation that deeply shaped her understanding of herself and her family history.

For much of her adult life, Eva knew only fragments of her wartime story. In 2005, she returned to Poland with her daughter Felicia to retrace her family history. During that journey, she visited Treblinka, where her mother had been murdered, and was also reunited with Sister Klara, the nun who had helped save her life. Eva later described the reunion as a life-changing moment that helped her understand the gifts of life, love, and memory she had been given.