Young Geddy’s nightmares at horror stories
Mike Cohen
Mike Cohen
·
Follow
6 min read
·
Feb 2, 2021
Listen
Share
Jewish Telegraph, June 2012
GARY Lee Weinrib was an angry youngster. Angry at the people who had put his parents through unbelievable horrors in the Holocaust.
Gary, who later became rock legend Geddy Lee, grew up hearing horrific tales of his parents’ time in concentration camps.
The Rush frontman told me: “My parents — especially my mum — were never shy to talk about what happened to them during the war. My dad not so much.
“It gave me plenty of nightmares, that’s for sure. I had a lot of anger as a child towards the people who had done that to them. It’s hard to listen to a tough life that your parents had.
“You want to make life easier for them, but then you go through teenage hell and become a pain in the ass to them anyway.
“It’s a teenager’s job to rebel against their parents. After I had moved out of home and gone my own way, I appreciated more what they had gone through and I was able to see them more clearly as people.”
Geddy’s mother, Manya (Mary) Rubenstein, was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April, 1945, while his father, Morris Weinrib, was rescued from Dachau.
The pair didn’t know each other when they were intially interned in a labour camp in their hometown of Staracohwice, Poland, in 1941.
They were sent to Auschwitz, before being shipped off to Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, respectively.
The couple were reunited after the war and lived in the officers’ quarters of Bergen-Belsen after it was turned into a displaced-persons camp. They were also among 2,000 couples who married in the camp after liberation.
In 1947, Manya and Morris emigrated to Toronto, where Geddy was born six years later.
They had headed to Toronto as Morris had a sister who had escaped there before the war.
“My dad’s side lost almost everybody,” Geddy said. “He had eight brothers and sisters. He lost his parents and I think only one brother and one sister survived.
“My mother was luckier in a sense because she lost her father, but her brother, sister and mother were all survivors.”
In 1995, Geddy, his older sister and younger brother accompanied their mother back to Germany for a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
The family visited Manya’s hometown and saw the house in which she was raised.
“I wanted to go to Germany for the anniversary,” Geddy said. “And my mother wanted to go back. She felt it was important. It was an opportunity for my brother, sister and myself to be there with her, to support her and learn about that time of her life — and hopefully give her some sense of closure, which I think it did.
“It didn’t make me feel more or less Jewish than I felt before. I was certainly proud to stand there with my mother and I was very proud of her for surviving that.
“I felt sad at the loss of so many family members, but it is just a lesson of life that you take with you and count your blessings. It makes you aware of how lucky you are.”
He added: “Many times my parents were close to death in the camps. It was a terrible existence for five years. I don’t think I would have survived as well as she did.
“She’s a strong woman and I have total respect for her strength and respect for my grandmother who was an essential reason that they all survived.”
Geddy, married to Nancy, has told his own children, Julian and Kyla, about the Holocaust, but “I haven’t taken them over there yet to see it for themselves. I want to”.
Rush’s 1984 album Grace Under Pressure includes the song Red Sector A, written by drummer Neil Peart after Geddy had explained his mother’s story to him.
Leave a Reply