Leslie Meisels

Leslie Meisels was born to a Jewish family in Nádudvar, Hungary. He was a teenager when Nazi Germany invaded his homeland in World War II. In 1944, he and his family were forced into the Debrecen Ghetto. They were separated when Leslie was sent to Austrian farms as a slave laborer, and then to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. In April 1945, he was again put in a cattle car with some 2,500 other Jews, bound for another camp. The train was stopped and liberated by American troops in Farsleben, Germany. Leslie recuperated in Germany before returning to Hungary to search for the rest of his family. He found that his parents and two brothers had all survived. After the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, they emigrated to the USA and then to Canada. In 1961, he married Eva Silber, also a survivor. Eva was born in Budapest, Hungary. After her father was taken away to forced labor in 1942, she and her mother were confined in the ghetto. They acquired false identity papers from Raoul Wallenberg and stayed in hiding to be liberated by the arrival of the Red Army in January 1945. They immigrated to Canada around the same time as Leslie. Leslie and Eva lived in Hartford, Connecticut for six years and had two children before moving back to Canada. Their joint memoir Suddenly the Shadow Fell (French translation, Soudain, les ténèbres) was published in 2014 as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.