When I met Sandy Fainer, she lived on the same street as Miss Shepherd, a homeless woman who camped in playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway in London’s Regent’s Park area. He wrote the 2015 film, The Lady in the Van, about her. She would bark at Sandy’s two young children as they walked home, terrifying them.
Sandy had moved to London from Toronto many years before I did, but we became fast friends, and I learned about a small, cloth origami heart made for her mother at Auschwitz. Over the years, I heard stories about the heart and how Fania Fainer kept the precious gift in her drawer, threatening Sandy and her brother not to touch it.
Whenever the chance arose, Sandy would find the palm-sized heart and examine it, trying to understand its significance.
Fania Landau, as she was then, turned 100 years old on December 12. It’s a miracle that both the heart and Fania survived the liberation of Auschwitz 80 years ago.
Still, Fania’s story began in the Bialystock Ghetto in Poland, where her father worked in a factory. His colleague had secured a pass for Fania, allowing her to go to Augustow, a nearby spa town, to clean the villa being built for a Nazi official, also allowing her a perfect opportunity to find a hiding place for her brother.
Before she left on her mission, she hid the few meagre pieces of jewellery the family possessed: her mother’s wedding ring and a small gold brooch in case she needed to pay or bribe someone to help.
As they walked to the villa on opposite sides of the street, and although 17-year-old Fania was no longer identifiable by her yellow patches, which she had removed from her white dress, a nine-year-old Polish boy shouted “Jew” from across the street.
Fania pretended it was a joke and laughed it off, saying she wasn’t Jewish. She saw a priest on the road and approached him, making the sign of the cross, and asked if he had any news of Bialystok.
“It’s burning,” he smiled gleefully, adding, “and the Jews are frying.”
Despite her protests, the Nazis arrested Fania and sent her to Stutthof’s forced labour camp. Ultimately, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, where she worked in the Union-Werke munitions factory.
At the table with 19 other women, she sat in enforced silence and made bullets for the German army. In an act of subtle resistance, instead of packing the bullets with powder, she and the other prisoners would pick up dirt from the floor when they could and insert it, making the bullets unusable. As one of the women said, they could take everything away, but not their ability to think.
Fania Fainer and Zlatka Pitluk in Bialystok after the War.jpg
Zlatka Pitluk (nee Snajderhauz) met Fania and they had become best friends in the camp. When Fania turned 20, Zlatka was determined they would celebrate. Remarkably, she persuaded the women to give her little pieces of bread, basically their daily rations, so she could make a small round “cake” iced with butter and marmalade. Zlatka also wanted Fania to have a souvenir.
Zlatka had always loved handicrafts and managed to find bits and pieces to make the heart-shaped origami book. This incredible feat was done without talking or moving, as the kapos were constantly on the lookout.
For Zlatka and the other women, the defiance was worth it. “Life and death were the same,” she said in her testimony to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. No one knew if they would be alive to see the next day, but they were here today and wanted to celebrate.
As it says on the website, “Hanka, Mania, Mazal, Hanka W, Berta, Fela, Mala, Ruth, Helene (Lena), Rachela, Eva Pany, Bronia, Cesia, Irena, Mina, Tonia, Gusia (Guta) [and] Giza” all wrote messages.
“May your life be long and sweet,” wrote Mazal. “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” wrote Mania.
Fania kept the heart hidden while she was in the camp, slipping it under a rip in the bunk bed above or in the straw on the floor below, and miraculously even preserved it on the death march. She believes she kept it in her armpit.
After the war, the two women returned to the ghetto to see if anyone was still alive. There was nothing and no one.
Fania went to Sweden as a refugee. In 1948, Sandy, her daughter, was born in Stockholm’s Karolinska hospital. Two years later, Fania, her husband Aaron and a two-year-old Sandy moved to Toronto.
In 1974, Fania and Aron went to the wedding of Zlatka and Yudel’s daughter, Marta, in Buenos Aires, where they had moved. Fania brought the heart and put it on the table. When the bride came into the kitchen, she found the two women weeping, which is when she discovered the heart's existence.
In April 2024, I went to Berlin and Munich with Sandy, where she was going to talk about the heart and met Karina Feler, Zlatka’s granddaughter, who was also on the journey. “My grandma made this wonderful gift to Fania to celebrate life in the middle of the horrors of Auschwitz,” she said.
In 1988, Fania donated the heart to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, where it is the centrepiece of the museum’s display. “I wanted to show that in Auschwitz, there were still human beings, and people gave me a present,” Fania said.
The story of Fania Fainer appears in Heidi Kingstone's book Genocide
Fania’s gift is also the subject of a documentary called The Heart of Auschwitz. In one of life’s beautiful moments of serendipity, a French-Canadian film director called Carl Leblanc went to the museum because he was researching the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who was in Canada and being extradited to Germany for war crimes.
Leblanc planned to make a documentary about the whole saga. There, he discovered the heart. Mesmerised, he began a new search to fund a project called The Heart of Auschwitz. Carl tracked Sandy down, and so the story unfolded. He went around the world talking to the women who had signed the heart. Fania is known as the woman with two hearts.
Heidi Kingstone’s book, Genocide: Personal Questions: Big Stories, was published by Yellow Press last year
