On August 27, 2025, Fania Fainer passed away in Toronto at the age of 100. Fania was a Holocaust survivor, a woman of quiet strength, warmth, and resourcefulness, who transformed the shadows of her unimaginable past into a radiant life of love and enduring legacy.
Fania was born in Bialystok, Poland in 1924, a middle child between an older brother and a younger sister. At sixteen, while walking down the street, she was identified as a Jew and imprisoned. She never saw her parents, her two siblings, or any relative from her extended family of about ninety people again. She was first deported to the Stutthof forced labor camp and then, in 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she toiled in the Union Werke munitions factory.
At a table with nineteen other women, she sat in enforced silence, manufacturing bullets for the German army. In an act of subtle resistance, instead of packing the bullets with powder, she and the other prisoners would surreptitiously gather dirt from the floor and insert it, rendering the ammunition useless. As one of the women later reflected, the Nazis could strip them of everything, but they could not take away their ability to think.
At that table, Fania met Zlatka Pitluk and they became friends. When Fania turned twenty, Zlatka was determined they would celebrate. Remarkably, Zlatka persuaded the women to surrender tiny portions of their daily bread rations so she could fashion a small, round birthday “cake,” iced with butter and marmalade. Zlatka also wanted Fania to have a lasting souvenir. She had always loved handicrafts and managed to scavenge bits and pieces with the goal of creating a heart-shaped origami birthday card with the other women at the table.
This incredible feat was accomplished without talking or moving, as the kapos were constantly vigilant. The women risked their lives with every element required to craft the card: the paper, scissors, pencils, glue, and the needlepoint F stitched on the cover. They even cut fabric from their own clothing to form the book’s cover. The defiance was worth the peril. “Life and death were the same,” Zlatka said in her testimony. “No one knew if they would survive to see the next day, but we were alive in that moment and resolved to celebrate our friend.”
On the day of her twentieth birthday, Fania sat down at her narrow bench to work. There, waiting for her, was the gift. “I looked at the book,” she recalled, “and it had my name on it—Fania Landau. It was for me. Someone remembered my birthday. In hell.”
She opened up the card which unfolded into a beautiful origami flower. Inside were messages inscribed by all the women in Polish, German, Yiddish and Hebrew:
“Happy Birthday, dear Fania.”
“Those who live through this—win.”
“Don’t cry when you suffer.”
“May your life be long and sweet.”
“When you are old, put on your glasses and remember what we went through.”
And finally: “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom!”
The messages were signed with their names: Hanka, Mania, Mazal, Hanka W, Berta, Fela, Mala, Ruth, Helene (Lena), Rachela, Eva Pany, Bronia, Cesia, Irena, Mina, Tonia, Gusia (Guta) [and] Giza.
Fania cried softly reading the messages, remembering her parents, her brother and her sister. The Nazis had taken everything away from her. She had no reason to live. But this card reminded her that there was still love and beauty left in the world. It gave her strength to survive another day. So she held onto it. She kept it 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. Somehow, she even preserved it during the death march, tucking it beneath her armpit as she walked.
The heart survived.
Today, that heart-shaped card is one of the central artifacts of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is the subject of a documentary film, The Heart of Auschwitz, and the inspiration for the award-winning children’s book Fania’s Heart. It anchors school curricula and educational programs across continents.
When we think of heroism and nobility, it is not just Fania who comes to mind. It is the nineteen young women, many of them teenagers, who risked their lives to create a secret birthday card in the depths of Auschwitz. Their courage was not forged on a battlefield or proclaimed in speeches. It took the form of a quiet, perilous act of kindness: a refusal to let friendship die.
Their story holds a mirror to our own lives. We may never be tested as they were, but their example asks us: Are we capable of choosing selflessness over survival, compassion over indifference, sacrifice over fear? Would love, courage, and friendship endure within us if the world around us collapsed into darkness?
In a magnificent general conference talk given in October 2000, President Dallin H. Oaks sought to answer this question. In his talk “The Challenge to Become,” he emphasized that faith isn’t simply about acquiring knowledge or holding testimony. It is a call to become; to have our nature, desires, thoughts, and actions changed, rather than simply add information.
“It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become.”
This transformative vision is also found at the heart of Judaism. The third-century Babylonian sage Rav taught: “The commandments were given only to refine people through them. After all, why should the Holy One, Blessed Be He, care whether one slaughters an animal from the throat or from the nape? Thus, we learn that the commandments were given only to refine people through them.”
This teaching addresses a question I hear often as a rabbi: Why is Judaism so exacting? Why does God specify the precise method of slaughter or prohibit certain foods while permitting others? Rav’s response is profound and liberating. God doesn’t micromanage these details out of capricious preference. Instead, the commandments are designed to refine us. By adhering to these laws, we cultivate discipline, mindfulness, and empathy. We learn to pause before acting, to consider the impact of our choices, and to align our will with a higher purpose.
This sobering truth challenges the notion that we can simply “go through the motions” of religious life, reciting prayers without feeling, giving charity without empathy, or observing the Sabbath day without inner rest. We reject such superficiality; ours are not religions of heavenly bookkeeping, where commandments are deposits in a cosmic account. Instead, the commandments form a divine roadmap, guiding us toward our highest potential. They are the blueprint for refining our essence, polishing away impurities like selfishness, anger, or indifference, until we shine with the light of holiness.
The Vilna Gaon, one of Judaism’s greatest minds, explained as follows: “The prime purpose of man’s life is to constantly strive to break his bad traits.” It echoes Deuteronomy’s call: “Now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only that you should fear the Lord your God, to walk in all of His ways, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut. 10:12).
To walk in God’s ways is an invitation to emulation. The Talmud illustrates this vividly: “Just as He clothes the naked, so too should you clothe the naked. Just as He visits the sick, so too should you visit the sick. Just as He comforts the mourner, so too should you comfort the mourner.”
Emulation unfolds in the quiet, everyday moments. It’s comforting a tearful child, forgiving a minor slight, extending a kind word amidst the chaos of busyness, or simply acknowledging a friend’s birthday with genuine warmth, as those brave women did in Auschwitz amid unimaginable peril. Each good deed serves as a sacred training ground: the dietary laws instill discipline and mindfulness; observing the Sabbath imparts the art of rest and mindful presence; giving charity nurtures a spirit of generosity and empathy. Through these practices, we forge ourselves into beings who embody truth even when it demands great sacrifice, compassion even toward the undeserving, honesty even in the shadows of solitude, and nobility even when it imperils our very lives.
For years, Fania kept her prized birthday card tucked away in a drawer in her bedroom. “I played with it as a kid,” her daughter Sandy recalled. “She would yell at me and tell me I wasn’t to touch it, it was not a toy, and it was very precious. And it is the only thing that she survived with. There was no family, no history, nothing.”
But that changed in 1988 when Krisha Starker, a good friend of the family, was hired to be the second director of the Montreal Holocaust Centre. Krisha had spent a brief period in Auschwitz herself. She came to Toronto to visit and at dinner mentioned that she had kept her striped Auschwitz uniform and was going to donate it to the Centre. Fania was suddenly, profoundly inspired.
She excused herself from the table. She walked quietly into her bedroom. And when she returned, she was holding the heart.
Krisha looked down at the fragile paper, at the needlepoint F stitched onto the cover, and immediately understood what she was seeing. She was holding a piece of the impossible: a documented act of grace carried out in the deepest hell. Her response came not as analysis, but as revelation.
“Fania,” she whispered, “this does not belong to you. It belongs to the world.”
Against the impassioned pleas of her husband and daughter, who could see only a mother giving away the family’s single surviving treasure, Fania made a decision of staggering selflessness. She understood that the heart was not just hers; it was a testimony. It was a light in the darkness that could save others.
Her hand trembling, her eyes filled with the memory of the nineteen women, she surrendered her most precious possession, transforming a private sorrow into a universal sanctuary. Fania Fainer, the survivor who had once been the recipient of that heroic, secret kindness, became in that moment its ultimate vessel. She did not merely relinquish a family treasure or a relic of her past; she offered the very symbol of her life’s meaning to the world, laying it bare before a public that might treat it with reverence or with callousness. It was a staggering act of vulnerability, an acknowledgment that while not everyone is called to expose their soul in such a way, she would bear the burden of this exposure. She gave away the one physical thing that anchored her to her past, trusting us, the strangers who now look upon it, with the heavy responsibility of giving her life, and the lives of her friends, continued meaning.
With three short words, the Talmud may capture the essence of our faiths: Rachmana Liba Ba’ei—God desires the heart. That eternal truth radiates from Fania’s heart—handcrafted in defiance of death, a repository of love, compassion, and hope. It serves as irrefutable proof that when people rise above their basest instincts and reach for what is right, true, and noble, the result is nothing less than spiritual majesty, a light that pierces even the darkest abyss.
And so the heart does not merely remember the past; it summons the future. It calls us beyond repentance alone, beyond ritual compliance or moral bookkeeping, toward the lifelong work of becoming. With the fierce determination of those nineteen women in Auschwitz, we are summoned to refine our souls, to emulate the Divine through unyielding kindness and unwavering truth. We are asked to shape lives defined not by what we possess, nor by what we know, nor even by what we do, but by the enduring, transformative question that confronts every faithful human being: who we dare to become.
Jarrod R. Grover, Senior Rabbi of Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Toronto, is a spiritual leader known for his passionate teaching and interfaith outreach, particularly with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Art by Merrilee Liddiard.
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Reading this makes me want to be more intentional about extending grace in the hells of those I rub shoulders with.
This heart is located in the neighbourhood I live in and I have seen it! Thank you for sharing its story here.