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Malvina Shabes, known as “Visia,” was just 10 years old when her parents and nannies fled her native Poland to Siberia. It was 1939, and had just been invaded by the Nazis. The family survived, being found in Siberian labor camps. Malvina died in Toronto on November 10, 2020 coronavirus blazed across the retirement home. He was 93 years old.
Despite his youthful panic, “he was probably one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet,” his son Jeff Shabes told BuzzFeed News. “He was always worried about everyone but himself.”
Account by account, he lived an extraordinary life. The mother of two sons and a friend of many, she never neglected the story of her life. “It was a curiosity, he was willing to talk about life in Siberia and what it was like during the war,” Jeff said.
Born in Krakow, Poland, in 1929, he and his Nazi family escaped “through a miracle,” the son said.
In his stories, the Falklands painted a bleak picture of the Soviet Union. After the treaty against the attacks on Germany and Russia, hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Siberia and other regions of the USSR, as strict as the small population. Like other Polish men, his father had to work in a work environment in conditions where many of his countrymen did not survive.
The family had a small apartment with “minimal heat,” she told her son, and there was often not enough food. Malvina had to go to a Russian school; it was a language he didn’t understand, though he eventually learned it and “adjusted a little bit,” Jeff said. When he met Joseph Shabes, he refused when he was eight years old. He met him through his father; both men pledged to oppose the Soviet regime. “They were kind of prisoners, in a loose way,” the son recalled. As time went on, Malvina and Joseph fell in love. They were married for 63 years when he died.
Courtesy of Jeff Shabes
Malvina and Joseph Shabes
In Siberia he never felt the place where the family could make his home. So after the war, Malvina and her husband, who was still unmarried, traveled between Poland and Germany. Since the lovers were Jewish refugees, a cousin from Canada was able to bring them to the country. Malvina’s husband went first and she, then 18 years old, followed him and waited for him to marry her.
As a new immigrant to Canada in the late 1940s, Malvina once again found herself learning a new language in a new place, but this time in a country where she fell in love. Settled in Toronto, Joseph ran the printing press, and Malvinas worked at the Simpsons, a large store he bought in 1978 from the Hudson’s Bay chain. He became the secretary of the director, a position he felt proud of.
She rested from work after the birth of her first son, Jeff. Initially, she returned to part-time work, but left completely after having an abortion. Jeff still remembers that time; kept him company while he was healing. “I didn’t understand why he was in bed, but I would prepare sandwiches for him and we would watch soap operas,” he said.
Mostly, he remembers the community that the Falklands built in Canada, making friends wherever he went. Over the years, it was a matriarchal decision, even though she cared for her husband and mother before she died.
George Kovac, a family friend of more than 50 years, said that Malvina was always nice and kind. He placed his life around friends and relatives, even as he began to develop dementia. “The family survived the tremendous stress and pressure, fleeing Nazism and the Russian system,” Kovac told BuzzFeed News, “and it shows me how much the Canadian experience has benefited him.”
After the first death of her husband, Pepsi the dog worsened Malvina’s dementia. His family decided to look for a retirement home where he could have social relationships, music and art. In November, he was one of eight residents at his home, the dead COVID-19k, in a second-wave appearance. The last time Jeff saw his mother he couldn’t get a goodbye hug.
I called her “mom,” she told me she was fine, that she could leave, that we loved her, “Jeff said.
He said it took time and effort to take his mother to the hospital, and the positive diagnosis came only from the staff of the medical center, rather than from the retirement home. He would have preferred to have done more housework, set off the alarm earlier, and be more transparent about the situation, which at the time he did not know the full extent of.
“The house didn’t call to find out how it was,” he said. “The house didn’t do anything.”
After death he told his story to the CBC coronavirus with the goal of humanizing dead people. His request was heard by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a few days later He spoke about Malvina in a national conference.
“Everyone we lose to this virus has family and friends who have plans for tomorrow and things they wanted to do. I think of the woman in Toronto who survived the Holocaust and recently died of COVID-19,” Trudeau said. “Dear ones, my deepest condolences for your loss. Thousands of other families who lost someone as a result of COVID-19, my thoughts are with you. Every loss is a tragedy, and every story reminds us of what’s at stake in the fight against this pandemic. ”
Malvina was a fashionable playwright, a skilled baker, and an enduring woman. He taught her to build a community around her where difficult life had gone. Jeff is honored that Trudeau has remembered his mother and hopes that his story will inspire other people to tell the stories of his beloved dead COVID-19z.
“My mom is the kind of person who said ‘I don’t want attention, don’t make a fuss about me. She always said,’ Jeff, put yourself first, ‘” she said.
But to explain the pandemic toll, he ignores her advice.
“My goal,” she said, “was to tell my mother’s story.”
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