By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban
The first question The Suburban asked NDG resident Isidor “Izio” Mesner is how he would describe his 105 years. “First of all, it’s something that happens to very few — so many events, so many wars in my lifetime that I went through — it was mixed, sometimes happy when I was married, sometimes very terrible,” the NDG resident said.
Mesner, who celebrated his birthday Sunday with a tea party with some friends, was born in Przemsyl in the Galicia area of Poland Jan. 19, 1920. “My parents had a grocery store and we were a middle class family — we didn’t have so many problems like so many Jewish people,” he explained. “There was hardly any intermixing with the non-Jewish people. There were Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, and they lived their own lives. No one intermarried. Any hostility was mostly not openly shown, but there was some boycotting of Jewish stores.”
When the Germans invaded Poland, in 1939, Mesner was studying outside his city. “I couldn’t go back to my city. Someone told me I could go on a train to the Soviet Union, at night. I jumped on the train and then ended up in Dagestan [in the North Caucasus in Russia], near Georgia.”
Luck helped him survive the war. In Russia, “I was first given a job of supervising people working in a field with vegetables. People were stealing, and one time I stole some vegetables too because I was hungry. They caught me — the usual punishment was 20 years in jail, but for some strange reason — maybe they took pity on me — they didn’t sentence me.”
Mesner later left and found other work. “From time to time, I was getting sick — I would go to the hospital for a couple of days, that was relaxation. I had malaria and other illnesses. Then I went to a kindergarten — a woman there told me indirectly that her husband was killed by Stalin — and I worked there. I was then sent to an office for an examination for military service and when I came back home, I got sick — I had typhoid, and that saved me. The people who were supposed to join the army were instead taken to work in fields, and they were dying of hunger. Eighty percent of people who had typhoid died. I was young and able to survive.”
While Mesner survived, sadly, most of his family was killed, with the exception of his sister, who married a French professor and lived in France. After the war, Mesner himself received a military passport and lived in France. “There was no future for me there, so I went to a DP camp in Germany and spent time in Munich. My aunt, my mother’s sister who lived here, secured papers for me and I came to Montreal in 1950.”
Mesner lived on St. Urbain Street, in the famed Jewish area of Montreal, and other areas of the city until he moved to his CSL Road condo in 1980. In 1952, he met his future wife, Mila Sandberg-Mesner, and married her a year later. Sandberg-Mesner was a Holocaust survivor well known in the Montreal community for working for decades at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and internationally for speaking about her experiences during the war in Poland, and writing about her life in several books, including the acclaimed Light From the Shadows. They were both the subject of the partly animated film Second Chances, awarded Best Documentary Feature at the Queens World Film Festival in New York last year. They were married until her passing in November, 2023, just before her 100th birthday.
Mesner has lived a modest life in Montreal in the last 75 years, working several jobs including for the Fleetwood television manufacturing company, and thriving through success in stock investments. Later in life, he became a director-general of a company participating in the annual fireworks competition in Montreal. When they retired, he and Mila travelled extensively, including to where he and his wife grew up.
“It was always my desire to travel,” Mesner says. The Suburban, of course, had to ask the question asked of all those who have lived to be 100 or more — how did you do it? He is in generally good health, with the exception of high blood pressure. “I liked doing exercise, skiing and I was quite active.” We were also told that everything he eats is organic and natural.
Amy-Sue Silcoff of Compagnons-Dropin-Companions, which provides in-home care for Mesner, marvels at his longevity and continued energy. “When I started to work with Izio and his wife more than three years ago, you couldn’t keep up with him,” she told The Suburban. “He was fast on his feet, he would run down the hallway. I would take him to Beaver Lake, he was amazing at 100 years old. We’ve become like family. He still exercises in his building’s gym- he’s amazing! For us, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to care for the Mesners — kind, loving, generous people.” n