 My father, Yuliy Samonovich Boronsky, was born in 1904 in Lithuania of Russian parents and then lived in Moscow for several years. 1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution. My grandparents were factory owners and in 1923 they decided it was time to leave. They moved the family to Paris. They continued to live a very good life before they lost everything in a business partnership that went badly wrong. As you can see my father Yuliy was quite a handsome fellow. Here he is, here he is reclining on a hill above a beach on the French Riviera taking part in a bronze king competition. He was very proud of this photo. My father studied chemical engineering at the University of Toulouse. After the loss of the family business he worked a variety of jobs including operating a deli in downtown Paris. The outbreak of World War II changed everything. My father joined up to fight the Nazis. He served as a captain in the French Army. In June 1940 Paris was occupied and fear was spreading throughout Europe. In June 1940, 350,000 people were rescued in a massive evacuation at Dunkirk. But my father was one of the 40,000 left behind. Captured and interned in a prisoner of war camp in Germany, he managed to stay alive and to keep his Jewishness a secret in part because his then French wife Jean-Elan sent him letters loaded with Catholicisms, letters with tiny little Catholic medals enclosed. When he was released he returned to occupied Paris. He urged his widowed father Simeon to go to live with his sister Rosa, her husband, and their little daughter in Kono, Lithuania, so that he would be safe, which my grandfather did. The Nazis took the town a few days later and afterwards they killed all the Jews. This is a photo of my cousin. I don't know her name. I believe it was taken in the Jewish ghetto in Kono. You can see that it's fairly tattered. My father carried this photo in his wallet until a few months before he died when he gave it to me. My mother was Elsa Margrethe-Rick, born in Denmark in Ringköbing, a small town on the North Sea of Ulan. She worked three jobs to put herself through university, but during the war, like so many of her other countrymen and countrywomen, she was part of the Danish resistance, a hero. And hid Jews in her apartment in Copenhagen. Yuli and Elsa met at a camp for displaced persons in northern Germany run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, where my father was the deputy director and my mother worked as a unilingual secretary and translator. After the war, she was the only person my father told that he was Jewish. Later, they moved to Denmark, where my sister and I were born. My father went to incredible lengths to keep his Jewishness a secret, including having us baptized in this Russian Orthodox Church in Copenhagen, where I was christened Eda Maria Judith Borunski. I guess he threw in the Maria for extra measure. We came to Canada in the 1950s. My mother was artistic and creative, a gentle and very sensitive soul. This loom was one of the few possessions that they brought with them, and she wove some of our clothes. They faced many of the struggles that new immigrants face, recognition of foreign credentials, loneliness, isolation and fear, and they lived alone with their secrets. My father was charming and worldly. He spoke seven languages, a talented photographer, a lover of art, a tyrant, and a tormented soul. And he would sometimes rail against organized religion, shaking his fist against the sky, and wondering how any God in heaven would allow such horrible evil to go on. But we were kids, and we had no idea why. My father loved having me pose in his big Russian hat. When I was seven, he marched us off to the Lampton County Courthouse in Sarnia, Ontario, where he changed our names. And I went from being Eda Maria Judith Borunski to Judy Darcy. Changing our names, and especially changing a Russian name at the height of the Cold War, probably got some neighbors talking. But we were white, and we looked like everybody else in Sarnia, so it wasn't like changing your name from Daliwal or Chang to Darcy, and we were able to just blend in. For forty long years, my father kept his secret. It tortured him, and his torment hurt our whole family in many ways. And then in his eighties, he moved to Toronto. He walked into the Holy Blossom Temple one day and met with the esteemed Rabbi Günter Plaut, and said he wanted to atone for hiding his Jewish heritage for so many years. And then slowly, piece by piece, he revealed his story to his kids about what had really happened to his family, about coming to Canada to keep his family safe. And the veil of secrecy was slowly lifted. And after he died at the age of 93, we found a video that he had taped for Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation that told us even more. This is the photo of the cousin I never knew. It is a reminder of the horror of hatred and bigotry, and of the trauma my father lived with his entire life. The trauma of loss and the trauma of surviving when his family did not. It's also a reminder of why it's important to tell his story, to tell our stories, so that we never, ever forget. In a world where hatred and bigotry are on the rise, it has never been more important for us to come together, to build bridges, not walls. To share our profound belief that as human beings we are better than this, that good people will say no to hatred and bigotry in all its forms, and that we will say yes to diversity and love and community, and most fall to hope.