When Saul Reichert stepped off the boat at Pier 21 in Halifax in January 1948, he had nothing but the clothes on his back, a single English pound, and a handful of U.S. dollars. He was 17 years old, the lone survivor of his family, and he had just endured the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz.
Reichert died in Toronto on July 24 at the age of 95, leaving behind a remarkable Canadian story of reinvention, resilience, and gratitude. He arrived in this country as part of the War Orphans Project, an agreement between the Canadian Jewish Congress and the federal government that ultimately brought 1,123 Jewish survivors under the age of 18 to Canada. It was also the first real breach in Canada’s notoriously restrictive immigration policies that had closed the door to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War.
“He didn’t look back, he looked forward and lived in the present,” said David Margolus, an Edmonton lawyer whose parents sponsored Reichert when he arrived in Alberta in 1948. Margolus was born two years later, and Reichert became a fixture in his life for the next seven decades. “He was in every sense a part of our family. He was like an older brother to me.”
A childhood erased by the Nazis
Shlomo Reichert was born on Dec. 17, 1930, in Pabianice, a small city near Łódź in central Poland. He was the only son of Betzalel Reichert and his wife, the former Udel Rotblat, who together had four daughters. A fifth girl, Saul’s half-sister, was the daughter of Betzalel’s first wife, who had died. The family ran a paint-supply shop and lived a comfortable middle-class life, though the Depression left its mark.
Saul later described his early years as warm and full of love. That changed in 1939. His father died of natural causes, and Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Saul was eight years old.
In 1940, the family was forced into the Pabianice ghetto, where Saul managed to continue some schooling. Two years later, they were deported to the Łódź ghetto, where conditions were brutal. There was no school, and food was almost impossible to find. “People were sitting in the streets waiting to die and nobody could help them,” Reichert recalled in a 1985 video testimonial produced for the Jewish Archives and Historical Society of Edmonton and Northern Alberta.
Saul eventually found work as a sorter in a church where Nazi authorities had piled bedding confiscated from Jewish homes. His job was to slash open pillows and duvets, separate the feathers, and prepare them for shipment to Germany. A supervisor named Mr. Sharp took a liking to the boy and helped Saul’s mother secure a job distributing food, giving the family better access to scarce rations.
There was a grim upside as well. Jews desperate to survive would occasionally hide jewellery or cash inside the bedding, hoping the feathers might buy a few extra days of life. “For a diamond ring, you’d be lucky if you got two or three loaves of bread,” Saul recalled.
In the autumn of 1944, the Łódź ghetto was liquidated. Saul and his family were crammed into rail cars and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Armed German guards and attack dogs surrounded them as they arrived. “All of a sudden, they separated the women and the men.” He never saw his mother or sisters again.
“You could see the crematorium in the background,” Reichert said. “The people who looked sick and were very thin went to the other side and were never seen again.” Saul, though small in stature, was selected for forced labour and sent to a sub-camp called Gleiwitz, where he hauled railway ties.
Liberation and a second chance
As the Red Army closed in during early 1945, Nazi guards forced the remaining prisoners north on the infamous death marches. Saul and a cousin ended up on a train that carried them into Germany, where U.S. troops liberated them in May 1945. Hiding in a barn at first, Saul was sceptical of the soldiers until he heard them speaking English. “I was so excited. I’m going to live. I’m not going to die,” he remembered thinking.
He spent the next two years working in a kitchen for American troops, and even dabbled briefly in cigarette smuggling. Then he and his cousin learned about a visa programme that would take them overseas. Saul told officials he wanted to go to New York. He had no idea he was about to become Canadian.
His cousin, already 18, was ineligible for the Canadian programme. Saul boarded the ship alone.
Building a life in Edmonton
Of the 1,123 orphans who came to Canada under the programme, most were sponsored by Jewish families in Montreal and Toronto. Saul was one of just 28 sent to Alberta. He arrived in Edmonton, where the Margolus family took him in and found him a job at Teddy’s Lunch, a deli and grocery known for its corned beef sandwiches and chili con carne.
He worked seven days a week. Within two years, he had bought the business, with help from the Margolus family, and quickly paid off the loan. He went on to acquire two more luncheonettes and opened the Carousel, a 250-seat dining room and bar. He expanded Teddy’s, took stakes in other restaurants and a hotel, and eventually moved into real estate, purchasing farmland in nearby Beaumont and becoming a house builder and developer. A street in Beaumont now bears his name.
Reichert married Toby in 1956, and the couple had four daughters: Rochelle, Jerell, Adell, and Bonny. As teenagers, the girls worked the cash register or served tables at one of their father’s restaurants. Saul and Toby were avid card players, particularly bridge, and Saul enjoyed poker. When business flourished, they began wintering in Arizona, though Edmonton always remained home. After retiring, they eventually moved to Toronto to be closer to their daughters. Toby died in 2021.
A legacy of remembrance
“He was a very optimistic person, stubbornly optimistic,” said Bonny Reichert, a Toronto food writer and the youngest of Saul’s daughters, who chronicled her father’s life in her 2025 memoir, How to Share an Egg. “He didn’t expect to survive and when he did, he saw it as a marvellous second chance.”
Eldest daughter Rochelle said her father refused to dwell on the horrors of his childhood and teenage years. “He didn’t want to burden his children and didn’t want us to experience what he had,” she said.
In 2004, the Reicherts endowed the Toby and Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture at the University of Alberta’s Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. The annual series brings prominent Holocaust scholars to the university to speak on issues of remembrance and historical accountability. Reichert had strong views on the origins of the genocide he survived, laying blame squarely on ordinary Germans. “Look at the newsreels of 1933 to 1944. They were cheering him on,” he said in his video testimony, referring to Hitler. “There must never be a nation who can do what the Germans did and get away with it.”
In one of his final recorded reflections, Reichert returned to the gratitude that defined his later years. “To come to a country like Canada was really the difference between day and night,” he said.
Why it Matters
Saul Reichert’s life stands as both a testament to human resilience and a stark reminder of what Canada once was, and what it became. His arrival in 1948 represented the first real crack in a Canadian immigration regime that had turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi genocide, a policy the country has spent decades reckoning with. By the time he died, Reichert had helped build a family, a business empire, and an Edmonton neighbourhood, and had endowed a lecture series ensuring Holocaust scholarship continues in his adopted province. His story is a reminder that the line between survival and annihilation, between being welcomed and being turned away, can come down to a single policy decision, and a single open door.
