Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations is an oral history project exploring Montrealers’ experiences and memories of mass violence and displacement. A team of both university and community-based researchers is in the process of recording life story interviews with more than 500 Montreal residents over the next five years.



This movie, made by Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, employs short clips from life story interviews with child Holocaust survivors who arrived in Montreal, Quebec, between 1947 and 1952, looking to remake their lives, rebuild their families, and recreate their communities. Integration, as interviewees admit, was not seamless. As they struggled to carve spaces for themselves within the established Canadian Jewish community, their difficult wartime stories were neither easily received nor understood. See more on CitizenShift

Life Stories is housed by Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.