‘I was put on Earth to learn about the Holocaust and write these stories’

Monique Polak, MA 84, says it took her mother more than 60 years to talk about her experience during the Holocaust. And it took her even longer to tell Polak about a gesture of kindness and a brass charm that impacted her life and, ultimately, that of her daughter. Polak shares the story in her new historical picture book for children, The Brass Charm (North Winds Press, Scholastic Canada).

“I immediately felt as if I had a responsibility to tell this story to everyone I could possibly tell it to for the rest of my life,” says Polak.

In 1943, Polak’s mother, Celine Spier, was transported from Amsterdam to Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp located in what is now the Czech Republic. Just weeks after her arrival, on May 24, a woman, whom Spier described as tall and beautiful, found her sitting on a stoop, crying. It was Spier’s 14th birthday and she had not received any gifts. The stranger reached into her pocket and gave Spier a brass monkey-man charm.

Though Spier never saw the woman again, she secretly treasured the charm until 2012 when, on the eve of a trip to Amsterdam, she gave it, and the story, to her daughter. They were travelling together for the launch of the Dutch translation of What World is Left (Orca Book Publishers, 2008), Polak’s young-adult novel about her mother’s experience in the Second World War.

Polak, who feels an inexplicable closeness to the woman, wears the monkey-man around her neck every day. “He’s ugly, but I love him,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder how that woman would have felt if she’d known that almost 80 years later, the daughter of the little girl she gave the brass charm to would write this book, would talk to the newspapers about it and would share it with thousands of students,” she says.

A love of knowledge gained at Concordia

Polak says that she always dreamed of becoming a writer and a teacher. The two years she spent working on her MA in English literature at Concordia paved the way to a prolific career in both.

Her thesis advisor, now-retired professor and author Lewis Poteet, provided her with the support and openness she required to explore a topic that was considered avant-garde at the time: a psychobiography on author Lewis Carroll and his children’s classics, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

While writing her thesis, Polak was thrilled to teach her own English composition class as a teaching assistant. She was inspired by her English literature professor, Michael Brian’s engaging teaching style, which influenced her 35-year career teaching Writing for Children, The Stuff of Nonsense and many other courses at Marianopolis College, a post-secondary college in Montreal.