“He’ll Make a Good Companion for My Son:” Orphaned Survivors and Family (Re)Construction After the Holocaust

On 17 April 1948, Ernie Paine published a short piece in the Toronto Daily Star entitled “Kept Hidden in Box, Boy Finds Home Here.” The boy in question was Mendel Gwiazda, a Polish Jewish child entrusted as a newborn by his parents to Catholic Poles in 1942. The four-year-old was discovered at the end of the war, sick and undernourished, by representatives of the local Jewish community. Both of Mendel’s parents were murdered. In Toronto, Canada, Wolfe Goldberg had all but given up hope that any of his Polish relatives had survived. Then the news came: little Mendel – the son of Goldberg’s distant cousin, Elka – had survived. Goldberg made it his mission to adopt the boy.

In April 1948, a social worker placed Mendel on a ship destined for the Hudson River Pier, New York City, where Wolfe Goldberg stood eagerly awaiting his arrival. “He’ll make a good companion for my five-year-old son, Gerald,” Goldberg declared, as he glanced down at the joyful face of his new child.[i] Through an examination of social service case reports, public records, and oral history accounts, this paper aims to narrate the experiences of orphaned youth who, like Mendel, immigrated to Canada for the purpose of family reunification and adoption in the first years after the Shoah.

[i] Paine, “Kept Hidden in Box, Boy Finds Home Here,” 2.