Proud Mary gave away Rush album to anyone who couldn’t afford it
Jewish Telegraph, July 2021
RUSH frontman Geddy Lee’s mother, Mary Weinrib, died earlier this month in Toronto, just a few weeks shy of her 96th birthday.
The Holocaust survivor was well-known to Rush fans through her appearance in the 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage and, more recently, Dave and Virginia Grohl’s From Cradle to Stage docu-series.
Mary was born Manya (Malka) Rubinstein in 1925 in Warsaw and grew up in Wierzbnik, a shtetl that was part of Starachowice, Poland.
She endured the labour camp at the munitions factory in Starachowice and then in Auschwitz, where she met and fell in love with Morris Weinrib, and at Bergen-Belsen, where she was finally liberated in April, 1945.
She was reunited with Morris the following year and they emigrated to Canada.
After Morris died in 1965, Mary was left with three young children and a variety store that her husband had owned and managed.
She would say that if you couldn’t find it at Times Square Discount, you didn’t need it.
Mary was a regular at Rush concerts. When the first Rush album was released in 1974, Mary plastered the windows of her shop with Rush posters and gave albums away to youngsters who couldn’t afford to buy them.
In From Cradle to Stage, Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl discusses the Holocaust with her and her son.
He then says: “As we were sitting with Geddy and his Mom, I was thinking, if it weren’t for her I might not be a drummer.”
Geddy, who was born Gary Weinrib, told me in 2012: “My parents — especially my mum — were never shy to talk about what happened to them during the war. My dad not so much.
“It gave me plenty of nightmares, that’s for sure. I had a lot of anger as a child towards the people who had done that to them. It’s hard to listen to a tough life that your parents had.
“You want to make life easier for them, but then you go through teenage hell and become a pain in the ass to them anyway.
“It’s a teenager’s job to rebel against their parents. After I had moved out of home and gone my own way, I appreciated more what they had gone through and I was able to see them more clearly as people.”
He added that his mother was “luckier” than his father as she only lost her father in the Holocaust, “but her brother, sister and mother were all survivors”.
In 1995, Geddy, his older sister and younger brother accompanied their mother back to Germany for a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
The family visited Manya’s hometown and saw the house in which she was raised.
“I wanted to go to Germany for the anniversary,” Geddy told me. “And my mother wanted to go back. She felt it was important.
“It was an opportunity for my brother, sister and myself to be there with her, to support her and learn about that time of her life — and hopefully give her some sense of closure, which I think it did.
“I was certainly proud to stand there with my mother and I was very proud of her for surviving that.”
He added: “Many times my parents were close to death in the camps. It was a terrible existence for five years. I don’t think I would have survived as well as she did.
“She’s a strong woman and I have total respect for her strength and respect for my grandmother who was an essential reason that they all survived.”
Rush’s 1984 album Grace Under Pressure includes the song Red Sector A, written by drummer Neil Peart — who died last year — after Geddy had explained his mother’s story to him.
Red Sector A was “not directly about” his mother’s experiences, Geddy said.
“It was an idea that Neil had, born out of a few things including a conversation we had had about the moment my mother was liberated.
“One of the questions she asked herself was ‘how could people have allowed this to happen?’ She thought that the rest of the world was like that, but she was shocked that when she came out of the camp, the rest of the world was intact.
“She couldn’t believe how other parts of the world would allow them to go through what they went through.”
When Mary saw the Nazis surrendering on April 15, 1945, she actually thought they were being arrogant by making a double salute.
The family asked mourners to make donations to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.
