In this video, David Shafran explains how the Canadian Jewish Congress helped him find housing and employment when he first arrived in Vancouver. Source: Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, 1987
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Video begins with inter-title in white text on black screen while instrumental music plays and fades into the next frame: The Canadian Jewish Congress helped David Shafran settle in Vancouver when he first arrived in March 1949.
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Cut to Holocaust survivor David Shafran, sitting in front of a beige background, and looking to the right of the camera. The camera shows his face and shoulders as he speaks during an interview conducted in Vancouver in 1987.
>> David Shafran: The Congress was quite active.
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The name “David Shafran” and the location of the filmed interview, “Vancouver”, appear in white text above David's left shoulder.
>> They helped me get a place to live. Funny enough that I ended up in an old folks' home, because they had an empty room there. So they gave it to me.
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Cut to black-and-white photograph of a bird's eye view of a city. Several buildings are pictured on either side of a river. A bridge connecting the two banks is pictured on the right-hand side of the photo. Several mountain peaks are visible in the background. The photo caption appears in white text in the top-right corner, “Vancouver, 1940s”.
>> The Congress found me a job to teach me how to be a tailor.
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Cut to David Shafran in front of the camera.
>> You know, how to operate a machine. And it was very, very hard, because some of them were tailors at home. So they had to catch up on their technique. I was not a tailor, and they put you on those high-powered machines. And I tried to stop that wheel using the automatic break with my hand, and in a few days my hand was swollen. The people that I knew here, they had a restaurant in Germany, and she had a food store before the war in Poland. She was older. She and her husband. That was her second husband. Her first husband was killed in the war. And we bought together, we bought after I would say about a year. And I tried with another friend. He opened a tailor shop, and I tried to help him. It didn't work out. So we bought Max's.
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Music plays for the remainder of the video. Three credit pages appear in white text on black screen: Interview conducted by Robert Krell, Holocaust Documentation Project, Vancouver, 1987, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre
Images: City of Vancouver Archives, Courtesy of George Thompson
Directing: Helgi Piccinin; Editing and Colorization: Michaël Gravel, Helgi Piccinin; Audio Mix and Original Music: Pierre-Luc Lecours. [Logo for Chaire de recherche du Canada en patrimoine ethnologique]
Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, copyright 2017.
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End of transcript.