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"When Warsaw was destroyed, when the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, we were frightened," writes Harry Klein in the Preface to Czentochov: Our Legacy. "We no longer feared death. We all expected to be murdered. Our fear was more profound: We were afraid that our deaths would be forgotten; that no one would ever knew we existed.
"We fought not only Hitler's plan for our total and systematic destruction but also his attempt to erase the memory of Jewish existence."
Harry Klein came to Canada in 1948 and five years later opened a successful printing company. He and his wife raised three daughters, who married in turn and had seven grandchildren.
But he never forgot the vow he made on May 5, 1945, the day he was liberated from the Allach-Dachau concentration camp. As tears of anger streamed down his face, he devoted himself to memory; to the preservation of the legacy of the individuals and the communities destroyed in the Nazi madness.
He kept his vow. Through the Czenstochov Society of Montreal --which he still heads-- he organized annual memorial services around the time of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar and the anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Czentstochov, his home town.
In 1966, he and fellow survivor Dr. Benjamin Orenstein published a book in Yiddish commemorating the vibrant Jewish community of Czentochov, which was an important Polish and Jewish cultural centre 125 miles south of Warsaw.
In 1989, realizing that the number of survivors of the Holocaust was slowly dwindling, Klein called a meeting of his children and those of his fellow survivors and organized the Second Generation Czenstochov Survivors Society.
It was the membership of this group --including his own daughter Ruth Klein Tatner-- that initiated the Czenstochov: Our Legacy project. Largely unable to read Yiddish, they wanted a legacy that they could understand and pass on to their own children. They wanted a context and a structure to the stories they had heard all their lives.
"I heard my parents talking about the first ghetto, the second ghetto and the liquidation of the ghetto," explains Society member Evy Solomon. "But what did that all mean?
"I remember my mother telling me that when the Germans came to liquidate the ghetto, my grandfather was running around on the roof of the building, screaming that he wanted to live," Solomon says. "While my grandmother sat very calmly in the kitchen, telling my mother that she was going to have to look after the rest of the family alone."
Growing up in a survivor household took its toll on the normal process of growing up, Solomon explains. History and fear were never very far away.
"I always had this impending sense of doom. As if something terrible was about to happen in the next minute. When I read the testimony of others in Our Legacy, I think I felt somewhat more understood.
"But that's not the raison d'etre of the book," she cautions. "It's a historical document, a legacy of experiences and memories and feelings.
"When you look at the pictures, there's very concrete, hands-on, tangible proof that the generations have survived."