lit a candle 12h agoI just finished My Silent Pledge last week, sitting out on my porch, and now I open the news and he's gone at 95. That book stayed with me for days.
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Sidney Zoltak was a Polish-born Canadian Holocaust survivor, author and educator who spent much of his later life making sure young people heard first-hand what had happened to the Jews of Europe. Born Yehoshua Zoltak in Siemiatycze, Poland, in 1931, he survived nearly two years in hiding before settling in…
Sidney Zoltak was a Polish-born Canadian Holocaust survivor, author and educator who spent much of his later life making sure young people heard first-hand what had happened to the Jews of Europe. Born Yehoshua Zoltak in Siemiatycze, Poland, in 1931, he survived nearly two years in hiding before settling in Montreal, where he became one of the city's best-known voices of Holocaust remembrance.
His family ran a clothing business in Siemiatycze. The town came under Soviet occupation in 1939 and German occupation in June 1941. In August 1942 its Jews were forced into a ghetto, and within months the Germans prepared to deport them to Treblinka. Shortly before the liquidation, eleven-year-old Sidney and his parents, Israel and Henia, escaped through the ghetto fence. They were eventually sheltered for fourteen months by the Catholic Kryński family, whose daughter Stanislawa remembered being sold a coat at a discount by Henia years earlier. Seven of those months were spent in an underground bunker. The Kryński family was recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 2011.
After liberation in July 1944, Zoltak found that fewer than seventy of the town's roughly 7,000 Jews had survived, and none of his classmates. The family reached displaced persons camps in Italy, where his father died in 1945. Sidney trained as an electrician, and in 1948 he and his mother emigrated to Montreal. He built a career in insurance and in 1954 married Ann Dickstein, a fellow survivor from Ukraine. They had two sons, Irwin, who died in 1973, and Larry.
Zoltak served as president of Canadian Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, represented survivors on the board of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and co-chaired remembrance committees at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre from 1993 to 2007. For years he travelled to Poland with students on the March of the Living, telling them that Treblinka was the only place he could hold a reunion with the friends he had lost. He returned to meet his rescuers in 1997, a journey later documented in the film Reunions, and in 2013 published his memoir, My Silent Pledge: A Journey of Struggle, Survival and Remembrance. A lover of Yiddish culture, he was involved with the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre and in 2018 helped create the recording Remember! Gedenk! Yiddish Ghetto Songs.
Zoltak died peacefully at his home in Montreal on Saturday 10 October 2026, aged 95. His family described him as a staunch Zionist who drew energy from speaking to young and old alike, and asked that donations be made to March of the Living Montreal. His funeral was arranged by Paperman and Sons for 12 October, with burial at Baron de Hirsch Cemetery.
Biography adapted from Montreal Jewish News (10 October 2026), Paperman and Sons obituary, Montreal Holocaust Museum and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Wikipedia ↗
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1Sidney Zoltak
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