04-06 Sam Ovens

You seldom have a family member’s story available to the world in a major film. But the wartime horror story linked to Sam Ovens, who married my mother’s cousin Helen Halter, was told in the movie, “Schindler’s List”.
To refresh the family connection to the story, Helen and her brother Ben are the children of Jack Halter, our grandfather Nathan Halter's older brother.
During WWII, Sam and his brother Shimon ended up in the notorious labour camp Plaszow in Poland. Their name was Owsiany, which Sam later changed to Ovens. In the movie, Oskar Schindler is trying to save the lives of workers in the camp.
For those who remember the film, the sadistic camp commandant, Amon Goethe, was using the prisoners as target practice and shot Shimon.
Details of this story, initially explained to me by my mother, were updated by Sam’s son Dr. Howard Ovens, who is the Chief of Emergency Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. In his graduation photo, you can see his mother and father, Helen and Sam, and sister Gale Rubenstein, who is a lawyer with Goodmans LLP.
The movie is based on the book, "Schindler's Arc". In the book, Goethe was executed by the American military after the liberation. Sam referred to the movie as “amazing” and “eerily capturing the look and feel of the place”. But Sam also called Schindler’s List more like a “home movie of a nightmare”.
Sam Oven’s story is one of survival, and when the prisoners in Plazow were made to march to another camp in Austria called Ebensee, to avoid the invading Russian army, 90% died. Sam was strong and resourceful. When the Allies liberated this camp, Sam was suffering from typhus.
Sam was one of a group of 2000 refugees brought to Canada on a work permit that required ten months of labour in Northern Ontario as a lumberjack in exchange for passage.
When his contract is completed, he heads for Toronto, and on the train met our grandfather Halter, who was an agent working for the Canada Railway News company, now called CARA. Grandfather Halter told him how to find people from Poland in the Jewish community of Toronto, which in those days was Kensington market.
And if this isn’t another coincidence, Sam went to a dance at the YMHA and met Helen Halter, who became his wife.
My generation was a lucky generation, missing the great depression and WWII. And although uncles on the Bulloch side served in the War, no one experienced more horror than extended members of the Halter family who were victims of the Holocaust.