“My wife, Sandy, and I have five grandchildren,” he said, “and it’s the tradition to wrap each child in it at their birth, be it a boy or girl.”
Hayden’s search for his grandfather’s Judaica collection began in earnest decades later in his grandfather’s boxes: 15 cartons containing thousands of documents, vintage stamps and photographs, even the autographs of Mark Twain and President William McKinley. The boxes had been unopened for 20 years in a storage room of his Vancouver home.
“One night, I felt I should confront it,” Hayden said. “The letters tell incredible stories of heartbreak.”
After his grandfather, Max Hahn, had been released from prison, Hayden said, Hahn and his wife went to Hamburg, hoping to emigrate. But in 194l they were deported to Riga, Latvia, and put on a train destined for a concentration camp. Gertrud Hahn is believed to have died on the train. Max was killed in a mass shooting near Riga in 1942. The Hahns’s two children, Hanni and Rudolf, Hayden’s father, had been sent to safety in England in 1939.
Before he was sent to his death, Max Hahn in 1940 and 194l was able to ship many household items, including documents, letters, photos and family papers, to Sweden. Hand luggage with personal items was sent to Switzerland.
After the war, the Hahns’s children collected the containers and brought them to South Africa where Rudolf, who had changed his name to Roger Hayden, lived. He died in 1984.