The Current - How a bowl of borscht helped a writer confront the Holocaust

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Bonny Reichert grew up hearing her father’s stories of the Holocaust, and finding comfort in sharing traditional recipes with him. The Canadian journalist-turned-chef shares her dad’s story, and the trauma she herself carries, in the new memoir How To Share An Egg.

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson and I do the show Frontburner. It's a daily news program, five days a week, a deep look at one story you actually want to know more about. One of the coolest parts of this job is when people show me how often one of our episodes comes up in their group chats. It's a real range of topics too. Rent gouging, Trump and Elon Musk, the Middle East, even culture stuff that has real consequences,

like Diddy, for example. So if you are one of those people sharing our stuff in your group chat, I just want to say thank you. And if you aren't yet, please find and follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts and please get it in the chat. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. A bowl of borscht changed everything for Bonnie Reichard. She was eating it in Warsaw on a rainy afternoon in 2015 around a restaurant table with her parents and her sister.

Bonnie's a journalist and a chef who grew up in Edmonton, now lives in Toronto. She never really wanted to go to Poland. It was so closely linked to the nightmares her father had endured. He was a child during the Holocaust and he barely survived. Almost every other member of his family was killed. But in 2015, Bonnie Reichert had agreed to go to Poland because her father wanted to make that trip. She writes about that meal in Warsaw and the many other ways that food has

featured in her family history in a new memoir. It's called How to Share an Egg and Bonnie Reichard is with me in our Toronto studio. Bonnie, good morning. Good morning. Thanks for being here. Oh, it's a pleasure. Why were you so reluctant to go to Poland? I grew up very fearful of the Holocaust.

When I was very young, my father told stories and they were quite beautiful stories. They were like fairy tales. He did an amazing job. But at a certain point, I started to connect that these stories had a historical counterpart and it was a terrifying historical counterpart. And from then on, for many, many years, I was very afraid of the Holocaust, afraid of movies about the Holocaust, afraid of books about the Holocaust, and just avoided everything I could to do with the Holocaust. Was that moment when things changed? There's a chapter in the book called The Numbers. Is that one of those moments when things changed for you?

That was actually a beautiful moment, strangely. I found the numbers on my dad's arm. I was only four or five years old. And these are the numbers on my dad's arm. I was only four or five years old. And these are the numbers that would be tattooed. This is his tattoo from Birkenau. And I said, what's that? And he said, some bad men put that on me. And I said, take that off. And he said, it doesn't come off. But his way was reassuring and confident and loving and I knew that something really terrible had happened, but there's a duality there and I felt comforted because

his protection was so strong. Tell me about your dad. I mean, you describe him, you say he's a force, an optimist and a lover of life. He really sounds like something. He really is something. He just turned 94. He's mentally amazing, very sharp, sharper than some people half his age that I know. He's a 94 year old with some physical ailments, but his soul, his spirit is the most optimistic, happy, joyful spirit that I have ever known. Why do you think he wanted to go on that trip back to Poland?

This is something that he had resisted. It was very surprising to me. He had always said, you don't need to go back, I have three sisters. He had sort of discouraged us, you don't need to suffer. You know, he knew it would be traumatic for us to go to Poland and see the concentration camps. And he didn't want that. He wanted to insulate us. But what happened was that he heard that there was a tomb in the beautiful Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, which has survived all of the terrible things

that happened there. And some relatives told him that it was a family tomb and that it was a very special tomb. And on a dime, because he is that way, he decided, no, we have to go. And convinced me, I was very reluctant because I had been raised this way and I had my own fear, but he convinced me that we would have a wonderful time.

This is my dad. We will have a wonderful time. We will eat in good restaurants. We will stay in a beautiful hotel. We'll have a wonderful time. Please come. And he's just not the kind of person that you want to say no to.

So I went. What do you think he was looking for? He was looking for his lost origins. You know, his whole family was murdered. What do you think he was looking for? He was looking for his lost origins. His whole family was murdered. He had a cousin, one cousin that he was with during the war and one cousin that he found after and very little else. And I think to go back and to find this tomb, which happened to be his grandfather's tomb,

who shared his name. So to find that and to see that the world that he had lived in before the war was real, this beautiful world, he was a Hasidic Jew and for him it had so much richness and I think it was very fortifying for him and very validating. He brushes the leaves off the tomb and reads his own name essentially. Your hair on your arm stands up, and I read that. I'm even feeling it now, yeah. It was an amazing moment, an incredible moment, even though I did not want to be in Warsaw.

And he promised you, as you said, that you would eat in good restaurants. So if I go back to the bowl of borscht, I mean, it sounds like it's a stretch, but this was not a good restaurant. That was not one of the good restaurants. We ate in a couple of fancier restaurants, but on that particular day we had just come from the cemetery where we had this amazing

experience. And it was too late in the day, we didn't have a reservation. So the pickings were slim and it was a dubious looking restaurant. And I was expecting very little. I had a headache, you know, it was raining. I didn't want to be in Warsaw and out comes from the kitchen, not some, you know, greasy hunk of meat, but this beautiful, clear, cool borscht with these gorgeous garnishes of chopped cucumber and sour cream and fresh dill. And this boulevard spoke to me and spoke to my own origins, right, of a Polish background, a Jewish-Polish background. What has the role of food been? I mean, even at that time, what was the role of food in your family?

Enormous, an enormous role. My father had almost starved to death in the Lodge Ghetto as so many people did and of course then he was in Birkenau and after that many slave labor camps and then death marches. So in addition to all of the other atrocities that were endured, the hunger, and you'll hear that from Holocaust survivors all over the place, the hunger was, you know, profound. And so, I think that he came through that experience understanding just how important food was.

Can I ask you, you have the book in front of you. Yes. You write about this and this is an excerpt from a piece that you wrote years later that was kind of a catalyst in terms of you telling his story. Can I ask you to read something from that? Sure. It's on page. I'd be happy to. 179.

It's just how he thinks about food. When you're raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food. My dad was so hungry during the war, he would have happily eaten a dog he caught, but he knew the SS officer whom it belonged to would have shot him for much less.

That's an extraordinary snapshot of what food meant to him and how it shaped his life. How did you see that at the table when you were young? He did hate waste, but there was so much joy at the table. And you know, my father has this sense of wonder about life. And I think that he acquired that sense of wonder when he arrived in Canada and found himself safe, free, his life opened to him and he's never lost it. And a lot of that sense of wonder is expressed at the table. He ended up in Edmonton. Yes.

And opens a restaurant when he's 20 years old. Yes. How does this happen? So at 18, he was sponsored by an Edmonton Jewish family named the Margolis family. That's how survivors were allowed into Canada because that was during the none is too many era. during the none is too many era, private families came forward and he got on a list of 1,123, I believe, orphans who were sponsored by private families. And he was just young enough to be considered a war orphan.

And so he sailed from Germany to Halifax and then he got on a train to Winnipeg and there his sponsor was waiting for him to drive him the last part of the journey to Edmonton in January. Having lived through everything that he had gone through at that point in his life, what was the life that he wanted to create for you and for your family? It was a beautiful life. He was very hardworking. He told me just the other day that he worked 364 days a year. So we had restaurants and the restaurants were only closed on Christmas day. It took me writing this book to realize that there

is intergenerational trauma. Of course there is, but there was so much else to it. And my sisters and I, we were protected, but we weren't spoiled. You know, we all worked at the restaurants. We understood that there was nothing wrong with hard work and he had modeled this. The intergenerational trauma is something that runs through this book and it runs through

it in terms of how you describe your own childhood. You say that there was a lot of beauty in your childhood, but also a sadness in you that you didn't understand. I really didn't understand what was wrong with me. I felt a heaviness. I felt a sadness. You know, I've been asked a couple of times if I was depressed. I wouldn't put it that way. It was a very specific, it wasn't a general kind of sadness. I knew some of what had happened to my father. And then I think the empathy took over and I imagined what it must have felt like. And I really, my little child brain really ran with it.

And in my little kid logic, I imagined that if I could truly feel what he had felt, you know, imagine seeing the things he had seen, people murdered in front of you, feel the hunger, feel being forced to march in the cold with no shoes. In my little kid logic, I would be able to take away some of his burden by absorbing it. And the funny thing is it's, it's a kooky kind of way to think, but much, much later, when I was in Paris with my husband, there was a, an exhibit about the treatment of French Jews during the war.

And we stood there on the sidewalk, you know, me with my Holocaust phobia and Michael knowing perfectly well that I am this way, kind of not sure are we going to go or are we not going to go. And watching people pour into that exhibit made me feel so good because it lightened my load and it made me feel that other people were going to share in the responsibility. So maybe my little kid logic wasn't that crazy after all.

It's not little kid logic. A, it's not crazy, but B, it wasn't just little kid logic. This is something that kind of coursed through a lot of your life. That intergenerational trauma, we know now that that's what we call it, but that was there through much of your life. Yeah, I had nightmares.

I had nightmares before I even fully knew what I was having nightmares about. So somehow this moves through generations and of course Jewish people are not the only people to have experienced trauma like this and many different people I think will relate to this kind of trauma. We talk about trauma a lot now. When I was a child we did not say the word trauma. What did you say instead?

Anything about it? We knew what my father had been through, but we didn't talk about trauma. We talked about being strong. We talked about coping. We talked about resilience. We talked about being happy and joyful and life having a lot of beauty and that being our way of fighting what was in our past. As you went through all of this,

especially when you were young, cooking was what you say in the book, that it was your comfort and your refuge. What did cooking give you and food give you? It was like air in our household, first of all. So my dad loved food. My mother was a good cook but didn't immerse herself in food the same way. But my grandmother, my mother's mother, who came from Ukraine as a teenager and also had

encountered food scarcity, she was an incredible cook. You kind of learned at her elbow in some ways. Yes. She didn't live with us, but it felt like she lived with us. It felt like she lived in our kitchen, to be honest. And she filled the house with delicious things to eat. What was that like?

She was an amazing woman, and very different from my mother and from my father too. So a third force, you know, it reminds me, I'm a new grandparentparent and it reminds me how important grandparents are. She brought something different. She had this kind of power and female sort of wisdom and this sort of food knowledge.

It was embodied because cooking is active and you're doing it with your hands. And it was, it was a way of passing on a kind of knowledge and a kind of love and history and memory, all of those things. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's gonna get personal.

I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Later on in life, you decide you're going to go to chef school, to cooking school. This is a really challenging environment, nasty. I mean, it's all of the cliches of what people think, a top restaurant is like, why did you do that? One reason was my pure love of food and food knowledge and cooking. And in a way, it felt very self-indulgent because I left a really good job in journalism and I went back to school.

I love school and I love to learn. So in a way, it felt very self-indulgent. I wanted to know everything. I didn't want to just know the things that I had learned at home or from my grandmother, my baba Sarah. I wanted to have official food knowledge. I wanted it to be validated. On the other hand, I was looking for a way to challenge myself. When you grow up as the child of a Holocaust survivor, you tend to think that nothing that you do is really hard enough.

And I didn't really understand that I felt that way until I read a stair-by-the-wall as the child of a Holocaust survivor, you tend to think that nothing that you do is really hard enough. And I didn't really understand that I felt that way until I read Esther Perel, who is the child of survivors, say something similar. And I thought, oh, of course I saw myself in that quote that she said, you know, what could you do that could possibly compare to Auschwitz. So in a funny way, it was a way for me to challenge myself and to do something intimidating. I was 40, everybody else was 18, 19, full of swagger. I had three little kids. It was tough, it was tough.

And it was a way for me to earn my own self-esteem and feel really good about it. I was much tougher than I thought I was. I was gonna say, do you feel like you came out sharper from that fire? to earn my own self-esteem and feel really good about it. I was much tougher than I thought I was. I was gonna say, do you feel like you came out sharper from that fire? Much tougher, much tougher, yeah. And prouder and just more confident in what I could do.

Another hard thing that you did was write this book. This is something that you've been thinking about for a long time. Tell me about the conversations that you had with your father about telling his story. When I was young, when I first started to write a little bit and show that I had a little bit of ability in writing, my father said to me, oh, wonderful,

we can write a book together, you'll write my story. And he meant it with so much love and inclusion. And I felt very proud, but also very frightened. First of all, how could I do justice? This story, how could I do it justice? You know, it's a huge responsibility to be your parents' biographer. But also, as I mentioned, I was quite phobic about the Holocaust by the time I was a teenager. And I knew that I would have to completely immerse myself in all of these things that I had been avoiding and that I wanted to avoid. And particularly in hearing my father say the things that had happened to him. So I knew, but there was a certain level where I couldn't stand it, you know, to hear that he

had been beaten, for example, still makes me feel like I'm going to be sick. That trip to Poland changed some of that? Well, there were two trips. So the first trip opened the door. The first trip I went to Poland, I was with my parents, I saw that there are many dimensions to Poland, not just gas chambers. And I came home with my mind more open. A short time later, less than two years later,

I went back to Poland without my father on a, you know, a more traditional Holocaust trip. And the survivor who was with us was Hedy Baum. She's an amazing woman. And she was almost like a surrog Baum. She's an amazing woman. And she was almost like a surrogate parent for me on that trip. And I was able, you know, as we went to Lodz, as we went to Auschwitz, as we went to Majdanek, as we went to that forest that was absolutely haunted, that's the only time in my life that I actually felt that something was haunted.

I was working through these things with the wonderful people on the trip, but especially with Hedy, who really helped me. And after that, I saw a window into how I could write this book. And it's not, it's, I'd call it a memoir wrapped around a family story. So it's not only my dad's story and it's not only my story of being his daughter, but a braided story of the two. What's it like to cook for your father? There's a couple of dishes, one in particular that's really special to him, that again speaks

to that relationship that you have, but also what food can do to us in terms of telling a bigger story. Yes. Yeah, food is so much, isn't it? It's memory, it's identity, it's pleasure, it's joy. The dish you're talking about is cholent. And when I was a child, my dad would talk about the cholent that his mother made. So this is a stew, it's beans and barley and potatoes and a little bit of meat, depending

on, you know, in the old country, how much money you had for meat, how much access you had to meat. And he would talk about his mother's chowlent and how much it meant to him and the smell and of course, the comfort that he associated with it. And what was so interesting to me always was that the chowlent was not cooked at home, but that it was cooked in a community oven because you cannot have your oven on during the Sabbath. You can't turn it on and you

can't turn it off. So the people, the women, would prepare the chowlent at home and then walk it to the community bakery where the oven was on all the time and slide it in on Friday afternoon and then pick it up on Saturday after services for lunch. And this cholent was like mythical in our house. This dish that meant so much to my father and of course meant his mother. But what was funny is that my mother never made it. My mom was a good cook. She wasn't a fussy cook, but she was a good cook. She never made it. And my father himself could have made it, but he never made it either. So what happened was, after I'd been to chef school and after, you know, I was sort of starting to have the idea for this book, I realized that I could make it. I could make chowlent.

It's just food, you know, it's just a dish. And so I started to sort of demystify it and talked to my dad, did some research, and my first attempt, I will admit, was not great. But the great thing about cooking is that you get to do it again. That's exactly right. So my dad told me to use brisket.

He had a slip of mind. Brisket is not the right meat. You need a fattier meat, like a short rib meat or what we call flunken. And I hadn't put enough water. He did tell me you need a lot of water, but it cooks. I cooked it all night. I did exactly what you're supposed to do. So the first one was quite dry, but I tinkered with it and I played

with it and I got it just right. And what was amazing was that the day after he ate the chowlent, he called me early in the morning, much too early. Michael and I sat up in bed, you know, very alarmed, why is he calling so early? And he said, Oh, your chowlent was so delicious.

It was so perfect. And he said, and you know, it made me think of something else, a cake that I haven't thought of in 75 years. And he said the name of know, it made me think of something else, a cake that I haven't thought of in 75 years. And he said the name of his cake, the cake is called, he said Pitterkuchen. It was, he like spit it out like a word I had never heard. And that's what food can do, food memories.

It brought back a memory of a food he hadn't remembered since his childhood, a cake that his mother made. What do you want us to think about as we read this book about the long tale of what your father went through? We're coming up to the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and it comes at a moment when there's an eruption of anti-Semitism as well around the world. People will be thinking about the effects of this and they will hear the stories of survivors,

but they will hear the stories as well of those who are the descendants of survivors. This is a book about what you have lived through in the wake of what your father lived through. What do you want us to think about when it comes to that long tale? First of all, I'm so grateful that I found a way to do this book and that I'm doing it

in my father's lifetime because I honestly didn't think I would ever be able to. And how wonderful that I can make it available to other people and people can learn through stories. So instead of learning through schools, which is also wonderful, but you know, stories are such an amazing way to, so I'm very grateful to be able to share and to open a window into, you know, what my father experienced and what my life has been like as a result. I think that it's all about empathy and even the name of

the book, How to Share an Egg, is about empathy and about the sharing power of food. And I think that, you know, we are all individuals, but we are alike in our humanity and the hate that we're seeing is, is so distressing, but I want to feel that we're more good than bad. We're more alike than different. and that if we just open our minds and see that food is universal and in that we're all alike.

You have inherited your father's optimism. Thank you, Matt. How does he feel about this? He's 94 and his story is now out, as you said, in his lifetime, which is really powerful, but also written by his daughter. When you talk to him about that, what is that like? He's very proud. He's very excited.

And, you know, that wasn't a given because the book is not the book that we had talked about. It's not all about him. A book has to have tension and a book has to have some ups and downs. There are some parts that I was very nervous about him reading. He can't see very well, but the whole book has been read to him and he loves it. And that just feels amazing for both of us, really. It's a really wonderful story.

Um, it's about a lot of things, food and the power to connect people, but also the people who are at the center of that story. Thank you for coming here and telling us about it. Thank you so much. Bonnie Reichert's new memoir is called How to Share an Egg, a True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty.