September 2024
Nicki Franek

Prague, 1971. The secret police officers were at it again—raiding my grandfather’s library for banned Western literature. It had been a year since he had been relegated to working as a railway gatekeeper after being fired from his job as a university professor for speaking ill of the Soviets. The tenant, who had been ordered by the State to live in my grandparents’ apartment—a common practice employed by the communists if you had multiple rooms—watched through the crack of her bedroom door, a smug look on her face. She loved calling the secret police on my grandfather. The (not so) secret police, donned in ill-fitting, drab civilian clothing, and decorated with a variety of communist pins, were brainless and drunk with power, yet my grandfather feigned respect. Witnessing your family get murdered in the gas chambers at the age of 21 will do that to a person. 

I wish my grandfather were alive today, so I could tap into his wealth of knowledge and experience. The other day I asked my dad if my Deda ever explained what the antisemitism leading up to the Holocaust was like and how he handled it. “He thought it was funny,” my dad replied. “He and his teenage friends would laugh at how stupid everyone was. Antisemites are idiots, Nicki. Their obsessive hate rots their brain. It’s hard to take them seriously.” 

If you knew my grandfather, this would come as no surprise. After all, his library was filled with Western literature, none of which the secret police ever found. 

My name is Nicki Franek, though had history been different, it would be Nicki Frischman. I am the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and a child of parents who left their families behind to escape Soviet communism. Though I would not be considered Jewish according to rabbinic law, I have Jewish blood and was raised on Jewish history, values, and traditions. As such, I have always deeply identified as Jewish. 

After the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, I realized how important my Jewish identity was to me and began the process of conversion.

I grew up surrounded by Holocaust survivors. To me, they are real people with real stories, each uniquely horrific. I didn’t know any survivors who weren’t riddled with survivor’s guilt, who didn’t talk obsessively of the many family members they had lost, particularly siblings. I learned about the Holocaust through these people, not through school. 
I also grew up surrounded by people who fled war-torn countries, or authoritarian regimes. In Canada, our immigrant community was our de facto family. I learned about communism and corrupt governments through people who lived that reality, not through ideological manifestos or theoretical study in university, but through stories that illuminated the day-to-day reality and coloured the moments in between the historical events outlined in textbooks. 

Holocaust survivors taught me resilience: how to pick yourself up, move on, and build something new; how to never settle for being the victim. Survivors of communism taught me bravery:  How to leave it all behind for a better future; how to speak even when it’s dangerous. 

That is why I speak today and why I won’t stop speaking. Freedom can be taken in the blink of an eye, words silenced into shallow breaths in seconds. I will not let our history be told by those who hate us. I will not sit silently while the story of Jewish emancipation is reframed into origins of evil. Culture is shaped by trends, and I will not allow this rise in antisemitism to be “trendy.”

The events of Oct. 7 shattered my heart. But, in all honesty, I wasn’t surprised, neither by the attack nor the world’s disgusting response. I followed the Israel-Hamas conflict of 2021 closely, and had already taken inventory of the rabid, uninformed antisemitism bubbling just beneath the surface of our progressive and social justice-centred spaces. What I hadn’t realized yet, fresh off the Black Lives Matter movement that I was particularly invested in, was the direction our “Liberal Left” was headed. I missed many of the hints of identity politics taking form, much to the chagrin of my father who had easily caught the whiffs of repurposed Marxism. But Oct. 7 changed everything. 

The stories I grew up hearing from my family started to breathe with fresh life. Concepts I could only grasp intellectually had become feelings I could relate to. My Deda used to tell me the story of when he returned home from Auschwitz alone. His house had been ransacked, so he went to the neighbours to ask for help where they sat at their dining room table enjoying a meal with his family’s china and cutlery. The betrayal that the Jews of Europe experienced, not by foreign invaders but by friends, colleagues and neighbours who suddenly became lethally hostile, is one of the most misunderstood traumas of the Holocaust. The Nazis and their collaborators were monsters, but so too were friends, colleagues and neighbours who turned against Jews fueled by righteous anger. And what is a silent majority, other than a pass for the radicals to set the agenda? 

Since Oct. 7, for the first time, I get it. I can obviously see how the Holocaust happened, how the Soviets convinced the public to flip on the Jewish communists who had supported their Marxist utopian dreams. I can count the people in my life who would comply, who would remain silent at every escalating step. 

This is why I won’t stop talking and posting, why I won’t stop reading, researching, and sharing — if not to fight the ignorant masses more consumed with their social currency than the cannibalism of their own society, than for my fellow Jews who deserve to hear a strong, confident Jewish voice. 

Nicki Franek holds degrees from McMaster University and Centennial College. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two children. You can follow her on instagram.com/nickifranek