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After 75 years of separation, Chester Wasiuk and Isabelle Metty’s broken family circle is complete again.”Oh, wow. This is my sister,” Wasiuk, 78, said softly as Metty walked up the driveway of their brother’s Grandville home on a recent morning.
“You’re my brother!” Metty said as they hugged, ending a separation that began in 1932, when [...]

Michelle and David Huck know well the promise and peril of adopting from Africa.The Calgary couple’s first attempt began smoothly: A Canadian adoption agency newly licensed to work in Sierra Leone matched them with orphaned siblings - Amie, 3, and her one-year-old brother, Sorie. For a year, the Hucks filled out paperwork, prepared a bedroom [...]

Those Europeans. They’re so sophisticated. Even their family and children’s films show more worldliness, artfulness and greater appeal for young audiences than most of what’s made this side of the pond. There are aspects of some of the movies screening tomorrow through April 18 at Sprockets, the Toronto International Film Festival for Children, that [...]

The Holocaust cast a dark shadow over Caroline Fournet’s French childhood and shaped her future career. The academic with a growing reputation in the field of international law and human rights was 10 in 1987, when the trial began of the local Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie, dubbed the Butcher of Lyon for his role in [...]

The thought certainly obsesses Burt Hecker, the narrator of Tod Wodicka%26#8217;s first novel, %26#8220;All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well,%26#8221; a title whose length and repetitiveness don%26#8217;t bode well for its contents. Burt, a medieval re-enactor whose fanatic refusal to live in the historical [...]

Lady Godiva (96 mins, 12A)Directed by Vicky Jewson; starring Phoebe Thomas, Matthew Chambers, James Wilby Our Daily Bread (92 mins, nc)Directed by Nikolaus GeyrhalterFor the third time this month there’s a film featuring an outstanding performance from the shambling, sensitive Philip Seymour Hoffman, a specialist at finding the vulnerable, sympathetic side of initially unattractive people. [...]

And yet, on occasion, Arek goes to synagogue to pray. He was lucky. He escaped the church, survived the Lodz ghetto, then Auschwitz, and finally visited the mass grave in which his family lie 55 years on.Holocaust Memorial Day this year has the theme Imagine! Remember, Reflect, React. The call is for us to use [...]

Social workers took them to a municipal orphanage in downtown Manhattan, where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours.The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: “Have you ever [...]

The long-haired man seen by Gail Cooper, 50, three times in late April last year, was said by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, to bear a “strong resemblance” to the man she saw carrying a child in pink pyjamas and bare feet from the complex on May 3, the night Madeleine vanished.Clarence Mitchell, [...]

‘There was a lot of tension but there were 31 police officers and hundreds of us from the community. Eventually they just left,’ she recalls with satisfaction.With sporadic running water and electricity and scant services, the barrio would often erupt into violent protests. ‘It has always been a revolutionary neighbourhood,’ Rodriquez says. ‘I became an [...]