Rachel Shtibel

Rachel Shtibel, née Milbauer, was born to a Jewish family on their farm in Turka, Poland (present-day Ukraine). Her parents were Sara and Israel Milbauer. She was a small child at the start of World War II. In November 1941, her family was turned out of their home and marched with other Jews of the region to a ghetto in nearby Kolomyja. In 1942, they managed to escape from the ghetto. Rachel hid with her parents and seven other family members, lying down in a cramped shallow dugout underneath a barn in Poland, for nearly two years. They could not speak above a whisper the entire time, and Rachel was mute for several years after this ordeal. In March 1944, they crawled out of their bunker and were picked up by Red Army troops. The soldiers fed them and took them to a house in Kolomyja with other survivors. When the Germans advanced again, the Russians evacuated the family to a hospital in Chernowitz. Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Rachel's father returned to their old home in Turka to recover a violin, case, and family photos buried by his brother, Rachel’s beloved Uncle Velvel, a violinist. These became her cherished symbols of survival and continuity. Her parents urged her to learn to play the instrument, and she went to school for the first time. Rachel did very well in school and in her music lessons. In 1956, she married Adam Shtibel, a fellow survivor. A year later, they moved to Israel, where Rachel earned an MA degree in microbiology and the couple had two children. In 1968, they moved to Canada, settling in Toronto, where she worked as a researcher. Rachel's memoir The Violin (French translation, Le Violon), first published in 2002, was reprinted in 2007 by the Azrieli Foundation in the same volume with her husband Adam's memoir A Child's Testimony.