For nearly half a century, Geddy Lee and the band Rush cultivated a devoted fan base with multiple platinum records, classic FM hits and tours around the world. That part is well known. What you probably don't know is that Lee is the child of Holocaust survivors. He will talk about that, and more, during a Holocaust Remembrance Day event on Jan. 27 at Queens University's Stan Greenspon Holocaust and Social Justice Education Center. But before he does that, Lee spoke with WFAE’s Morning Edition host Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: You're going to be speaking on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which is one of the camps where your parents were imprisoned. What's their story? How did they end up in the camps?
Geddy Lee: Their story is very typical of any Jewish people across Eastern Europe and beyond. You know, they were Jewish Polish citizens living in their small town. And one day the Germans rolled into town. And everything changed. And they were ghettoized. And, eventually, they were co-opted to begin work at the local munitions factory and the lumberyard. And three camps were built sort of on their backs.
So it was in these camps that my mother first came in contact with my father. The work camp environment lasted, I think, a couple of years. And then as the war got more and more intense, they shipped a lot of people from the work camp to Auschwitz. They spent a number of months trying to stay alive in that camp. And they were separated in Auschwitz 'cause it was a male camp and a [women's] camp. And he still would send little things to my mom, and he would bribe the kapos to give shoes, and things like that, to my mother. My mother was subsequently sent to Bergen-Belsen (camp) with other people from her family. And my father, I think he was in six or seven camps before he was finally liberated. And after the war, he was determined to find my mother. He did. And, fortunately, they survived and immigrated to Canada.
Terry: Now, did they talk about their experience or were they tight-lipped?
Lee: My dad was tight-lipped. Mother was anything but, so she spent a lot of time sharing her stories with us when we were children. She filled us with these cautionary tales, grateful to have survived — and she wanted to make sure we were aware and always wary that it could happen again.
Terry: Well, how did all this affect you growing up in Canada? I mean, could you relate to their story at all, or did it just feel like something from another world?
Lee: Oh, it definitely felt like another worldly story. But the fact that all of my family, those that had emigrated to the new world, they all wore the tattoo of Auschwitz. They all told similar stories. The more contact I had with other family members, it started to feel less like another world and more like the reality that we were lucky to be there, were lucky to be alive.
Terry: Did this work its way into your music, or did you keep the two separate?
Lee: Listen, all the things that happened to you growing up shape your character, shape your personality. Sometimes right away, sometimes it lies dormant for years. The older I got, the more those memories rose to the surface. And I can't say it directly influenced my music per se, but there was one song we wrote in our history called 'Red Sector A' that was born out of a conversation about the moment that my mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen camp.
Song playing: All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive
Lee: The story goes my mom was working in some sort of woodshed, stacking wood with another prisoner and the British had rolled into Belsen and liberated the camp. My mother looked out the window and made a joke, 'Oh, look, now they're saying Heil Hitler with two hands in the air.' Didn't occur to her that they were surrendering. So they kept working for another 20 minutes before someone burst into the door and said, 'Hey, we're free.'
She thought it was impossible because she couldn't reconcile the fact that they had been incarcerated for so long. She assumed that most of the free world must have been destroyed or imprisoned like her. Otherwise, why wouldn't someone have come to rescue her?
Terry: You wrote about your parents' story in your 2023 memoir. The number of Holocaust survivors dwindles with each passing year. What role do you see for yourself in today's world as a descendant of survivors to carry on their story?
Lee: I'm lucky I have a little bit of a platform, so I'm going to use it to tell my mother's story, my father's story, to remind people what can happen when fascism takes a turn and the chosen minority becomes a scapegoat. Scapegoating is a big part of propaganda. And my parents were the victim of that. It can happen at any time. And I feel obligated to the memory of my mother to tell that story as clearly and honestly as I can.
Terry: I know your father died when you were still very young, but your mother lived a very long life. In fact, she only died a few years ago. Did she like Rush?
Lee: Are you kidding? She could have been our agent. My mother loved our band — not at first, of course. She thought I was losing my marbles when we were practicing in my basement when I was about 15. But as we became more successful, she was incredibly proud and she loved to brag about us. And she even — in her little discount store in Newmarket, Ontario — she started selling records just so she could sell our records. She would sit by the radio, and she would beam every time a Rush song came on.
The Stan Greenspon Center presents "A Conversation with Geddy Lee" on Jan. 27 at 7 p.m.