Anka Voticky (1913–2014)

Anka Voticky, née Annamarie Kanturek, was born to a close-knit, extended Jewish family in the small town of Brandýs nad Labem, Czechoslovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When she was a small child, her parents moved to the nearby city of Prague. Her mother Hedvika arranged for Anka and her three siblings to learn to speak both German and Czech. At age 15, Anka began attending a German boarding school and later went to business college. In 1933, she married Arnold Voticky, a businessman with whom she would have three children. When Nazi Germany invaded her homeland in 1939 at the start of World War II, Anka's family had already started planning to leave the country. Her husband, parents and sister went on ahead, and in 1940, she and her two young children and 10 other family members began an arduous and circuitous journey to seek refuge in Shanghai, China. There they were endangered yet again when the Japanese occupied the city in 1941 and forced the Jews into a ghetto. The Votickys survived the war and returned to Czechoslovakia; but when the country came under Communist control, they went into exile again. They traveled through Belgium, the UK, and the USA to reach Canada in 1948, settling in Montreal. Anka's memoir Knocking on Every Door (French translation, Frapper à toutes les portes) was published in 2010 as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.