When Marguerite Élias Quddus was five years old, she found out that she was Jewish, but her parents kept telling her not to tell anyone that she was a Jew. That same year, authorities arrested her father and she was forced to wear the yellow star. Élias Quddus understood quickly what that symbol would mean to her life.

Growing up in Paris during the start of World War II, Élias Quddus and her older sister learned to remain silent about their identity. During the Holocaust, the sisters went to live in convents around Europe and pretended to be Catholics. Both survived the war.

Years later, Élias Quddus turned that harrowing story of survival into a memoir. Her short novel, In Hiding (published in French as Cachée) was one of five Holocaust survivor memoirs that the Azrieli Foundation launched Sunday at the opening event for 2013’s Holocaust Education Week (HEW).

“My thoughts turned to an idea in chassidic thought. They say the telling of a story can itself save the world,” said Naomi Azrieli, chair and CEO of the Azrieli Foundation.

“When we celebrate survivor’s stories, there is this terrible weight of knowing that there are millions of stories of millions of victims that have never been told. In the sharing of a story, you can save the memory of a person. In keeping a memory alive, you also prevent a kind of second death… the death of when a person or event is forgotten.”

The memoirs are a part of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs program. This organization has published 40 stories in English and French that are written by Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Canada after the war.

The Azrieli Foundation also turned these five new stories into short films that show the author reading from the memoir, as well as animated sequences that bring their story to life.

The other memoirs launched were If Only It Were Fiction by Elsa Thon, Vanished Boyhood by George Stern, Survival Kit by Zuzana Sermer and If, By Miracle by Michael Kutz.

When writing her story, Élias Quddus also illustrated several pictures in it with crayon. “It took me eight years to do the book,” she said in an inteview. “It was so difficult to write the story. I wrote in rhyme because of the musicality. It helped me to get all of the emotions out.”

When printing In Hiding, the Azrieli Foundation took out the rhyming patterns but kept her illustrations.

Élias Quddus, who lives in the Montreal area, now speaks at conferences and to many university students about her life in Europe during the Holocaust. “I do everything I can to make people know what happened,” she says. “That’s what makes me get up every day, to do my duty. It keeps my brain working. I am doing something useful.”

Holocaust Education Week, now in its 33rd year, runs through Nov. 9 across the Greater Toronto Area and other regions of Ontario. There are more than 150 diverse programs happening across Ontario for HEW, says Mira Goldfarb, executive director of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, which organizes HEW.

“Survivors are sadly leaving us and also losing their ability to speak with strength and coherence about their narratives,” Goldfarb said. “There has been a very tremendous effort on the part of Jewish organizations… to record and print those narratives.”

Among the various programs set to run during the week are survivor testimonies, musical performances and film screenings. It is considered “the largest educational forum of its kind featuring world-renowned experts and Holocaust survivors.”

In 2013, the Azrieli Foundation distributed over 11,000 copies of these survivor memoirs to high school classes from Newfoundland to the Northwest Territories. They are available free of charge to schools and Holocaust education programs, the funding coming from the foundation, donors and the sale of the books.

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten,” Azrieli said, drawing on a quote from author Rudyard Kipling. “We see that in the response of readers and students, after reading the memoirs, they want to learn more about the Holocaust.”