Eva Kuper: The Hidden Child Who Teaches Montreal to Remember

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Eva Kuper has no memory of the people who saved her life. She was a toddler when the Second World War tore her family apart in Warsaw, and she only came to know her rescuers’ names as an adult. Today the retired Montreal educator, who taught early childhood education at Concordia University, spends her time making sure young Canadians know those names too. As Holocaust Education Week is marked this month, her work is a reminder that memory has to be passed on, one classroom at a time.

A child hidden in wartime Poland

Eva was born in Warsaw in 1940. Before her first birthday, her family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, during the deportations to Treblinka, Eva and her mother, Fela, were rounded up. Her mother was murdered at Treblinka. Eva survived because her cousin Regina took her from the cattle car and claimed her as her own child.

Her father later escaped the ghetto with her through the sewers. She was first hidden with Hanka Rembowska, a children’s book illustrator. When Rembowska fell ill, Franciscan nuns from a convent in Laski, near Warsaw, took Eva in. She stayed in hiding, in the care of Sister Klara Jaroszyńska, until the war ended.

A new life in Canada

After the war, Eva lived in Poland for several years and attended Catholic school. She then left for Canada with her father and stepmother. It was on that journey, at sea, at eight years old, that she learned she was Jewish. After a short time in Toronto, the family settled in Montreal, where she built her life and career.

Finding Sister Klara

In 2005, Eva travelled to Poland, visited Treblinka and was reunited with Sister Klara, then 94, at the convent in Laski. The two grew close in the years that followed. Sister Klara told her that saving her was “the right, the moral thing to do.”

“My reunion with her changed my life.”

Eva has said Sister Klara gave her “the gift of life but also the gift of love.” That idea runs through how she tells her story today.

Teaching the next generation

In retirement, Eva turned to Holocaust education. She has volunteered at the Montreal Holocaust Museum since 2005 and has served on its board since 2013. She has travelled with March of the Living students to Poland and Israel, and in 2026 she joined other survivors at the New York Stock Exchange closing bell ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

She speaks to students wherever she is invited. In 2024 she told her story at Pier 21 in Halifax, then spoke to more than 400 students the next morning. Her goal, she said, is to have them “think about all the things that connect us as human beings.”

In March 2026, after a commemoration where she was due to speak at Vanier College was called off, she spoke publicly about why this work matters. “We live in a very fractured world now, and I think that we have to remember our history,” she told Global News.

Learn more about her story

Eva’s memoir, A Beacon of Light, appears in Before All Memory Is Lost: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust, published by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, which also offers classroom activities based on her story. Her filmed testimony, recorded at Laski, Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto, is on the March of the Living Digital Archive Project. To hear survivors in person, look to the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

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