Mickey Heller wasn’t eager to open up about his Second World War military service. But his grandson, Aron Heller, a journalist and contributor to The CJN, was curious about his zayde’s wartime past—and so, over the span of a decade, he asked questions durings phone calls, visits and emails.

As Heller discovered his grandfather’s fascinating untold stories, he decided to expand his scope of inquiry to include his grandfather’s circle of Jewish veterans who fought in the Second World War, and also Israel’s War of Independence as overseas volunteer fighters called mahal. In one story, Heller discovers previously unpublished details about a long-unsolved plane crash in southern Israel that cost the lives of three Canadian military volunteers in 1948.

Heller combined these stories into a new nonfiction book, Zaidy’s Band, to be released Nov. 11, 2025, for Remembrance Day. Heller joins North Star host Ellin Bessner to share stories about his late grandfather and the parallels between that elder generation and those who are defending Israel today.

Transcript:

Transcript:

Mickey Heller: Well I had taken a course in stenography and that’s what I did in there for two years because they wouldn’t let you go into air crew in the first place. There was a RCAF Mountain View station Bombing and Gunnery school, and I was stationed there for 2 years.

Ellin Bessner:

That’s the voice of the late Mickey Heller of Toronto, recounting some of his war memories to Crestwood Preparatory school’s Oral History Project.

Heller was one of the last remaining Canadian Jewish Second World War veterans when he granted the interview in 2022.

He was already over 100 years old, and he would pass away pretty soon after the taping took place.

It may seem surprising that it took Heller so long, 77 years, before he would agree to speak on camera about his wartime experiences serving as an RCAF navigator in Canada and then overseas.

But his own grandson Aron Heller wasn’t surprised.

He’d been trying for years to push his zayde to share those wartime details with him.

But time after time Heller would deflect the questions about what he had done in the war and instead direct his grandson to research the records of people who he deemed far more worthy of attention: Jewish Toronto friends who had won bravery medals, including one pilot shot down and imprisoned by the Nazis who managed to escape despite a broken back, or the merchant sailor who saved his cargo ship from blowing up in Naples, Italy, or those 300 Canadians who went back into action after the war ended, but this time to help the fledgling state of Israel defend itself from five Arab armies during the 1948 War of Independence.

They were called mahalniks.

Aron Heller took his grandfather’s advice, and his reporting is now a new book called “Zadie’s Band.” It’s being published November 11th and debuts in Canada this week just in time for Remembrance Day.

Heller says he wrote the book before October 7th as a tribute to the generation of Jewish fighters who made the world a relatively safe place for their children and grandchildren to live in. And who would be rolling in their graves to discover the same unbridled anti-Semitism which now their great grandchildren are encountering.

Aron Heller: I think it offers a level of inspiration today and guidance for those of us who are living through our times now, not to compare necessarily 1 to 1, but to have the sense that it’s never been easy to be Jewish, it’s never been free of of hatred against us, it’s never been free of of threats against you.

Ellin Bessner: I’m Elln Bessner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Monday, November 10, 2025, Remembrance Week.

Welcome to Northstar, a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News and made possible thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Gronovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

Aaron Heller is a journalist based in Tel Aviv, born to Canadian parents who moved the family to Israel.

His name may be familiar to followers of The CJN because he’s an occasional contributor, including a lovely story from a half dozen years ago in 2019 when his grandfather turned 100 and he took aron and the other grandchildren assembled in Toronto on a short side trip to show them a Toronto military memorial monument.

It’s called “The Flames of Memory.”

It’s now outside the Prosserman Jewish Community centre and it bears the names of nearly 600 Canadian Jews who served in the First and Second World Wars, and wars since, and didn’t come home.

On the other side are the names of hundreds of Jewish veterans, including Mickey Heller’s, who served and survived.

Mickey was proud of helping to get this monument built in 2013, long before the Canadian government finally formally recognized the unique contribution which Jewish soldiers from Canada made to the country’s military history.

That recognition would come only in 2018 with a tribute by Veterans Affairs Canada after my own book called “Double Threat” on the same topic was published.

Aron Heller joined me just before launching his North American tour beginning Tuesday, November 11th at the Toronto Holocaust Museum.

Congratulations, we’re speaking as your book is making its way out there. You haven’t seen a physical copy yet because of the mail strike, I guess, in Canada, 

Aron Heller: But yeah, I’m here in Israel, so I’ve seen the virtual one. I’ve heard that it’s arrived at some places in Toronto, and I’m going to be there on November 11th, so excited to hold it in my hand and talk about it in various places.

Ellin Bessner: Well, our listeners and The CJN readers know you as sort of the eyes and ears on the ground in Israel during the last two years and before, and you have written about your late grandfather, Mickey Heller, but now we get to see more than 1000 words, so we get to see a whole book about the man who basically kept most of his secrets to the end and was very difficult, perhaps the most difficult journalistic subject you’ve had to interview.

Tell us a little bit about why it was so important to you to try to get his story out of him before he passed away.

Aron Heller: Well, I guess it starts really from when I was a kid.

It was really like a lifelong mission over here, and I’ve always been super curious about World War 2.

We knew that he’d served in the war. There was a picture of him in uniform at his wedding, but he never spoke about it.

It was sort of like this unspoken thing, felt kind of taboo in the family, and I, you know, having the curious journalist bug always was interested in finding out what happened, and over a while he just rejected it again and again and again.

And eventually I let it go and became a journalist, and then at some point after many years, I realized, you know, I know so much about so many Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans. I’ve written dozens of stories about them that have been among the most satisfying ones of my career, and yet I still don’t know anything about my own grandfather.

And in 2011, right before he turned 90, I said “That’s it, enough is enough. It’s time to get into this.”

And the next 10 years were basically this back and forth kind of journey of trying to discover what it is that happened in World War II for him and why he’s kept it quiet for so long. And in time, I realized that that’s not that unique.

A lot of guys were like that, in fact, most of them were like that, and it’s been very satisfying to sort of peel away at that really slowly and layer after layer, get to this really untold story of the Jews who fought in World War II.

Ellin Bessner: So for our listeners who may not have read your beautiful tribute articles to him when you did come to Toronto for his significant milestone birthday, tell us a little bit about the environment in which he grew up in 1930s Toronto, 1940s Toronto.

Aron Heller: Yeah, well,  he was born in 1921, so he was that generation where when the war broke out in 1939, he was18 years old. It’s like exactly service age, and that’s what we often refer to as the greatest generation.

He grew up in the 20s and in the 30s in Toronto, and a time where Jews were really not a major part of the, you know, society, there was still a lot of antisemitism around.

The Jews, basically, they all lived south of Bloor in the immigrant areas, and he grew up in the youngest of 7 children, and it was tough. They were poor, they had struggles.

And when it was time, he went off to war, and so I really knew everything about him pretty much until 1941, and I knew everything about him after 1945, let’s say, but there was this 4 year window in there, which was like an empty space.

He’d talk about his life to that point, he’d talk about his life after that point.

It was that window there, which seemed like it was really significant for him, and as I learned afterwards significant for so many others, it was life defining, and yet a real hesitance to go there and talk about it.

Ellin Bessner: Why do you think it just didn’t go farther than a certain point with him?

What did you learn that you now feel was his reason for being so reticent?

Aron Heller: Well, I guess there’s a mixture of a bunch of things. First of all, when it’s your own family, a lot of times it’s harder. It’s easier to acknowledge it with people who you don’t have an emotional and family connection to. You can be more neutral and come as a neutral observer, and I’d sort of started imagining in my mind, what could it be? What’s this great big secret that there is to uncover? 

And what I realized is that it’s reflective of that generation that they were all trying to be kind of like the strong silent type, not talk about it, not complain, so to get on with it.

I didn’t give it too much significance.

It’s my generation that has more of an interest and tries to fit it into some kind of a narrative, but it was obvious that whatever it was, for him and for those around him, it was something that was very significant, and it was something that sort of marked the path for the rest of their life.

Ellin Bessner:  You’d mentioned at the beginning, a lot of them afterwards came to Israel in 1948.

Aron Heller: After World War II, they either couldn’t settle down afterwards, or they were looking for another cause, and a big part of the book deals with that as well, the Mahal, the foreign volunteers who came to Israel, and it’s really no stretch to say that without them, Israel may not have won the 1948 war, they really were incredibly reliant on those Jews and non-Jews who had World War II experience, and especially in the Air Force, where my grandfather was in Bomber Command.

Ellin Bessner: Right, and we can just remind our listeners that there were 300 Canadians who went over clandestinely because it was illegal, just as it kind of is now taboo and maybe illegal helping a foreign army, but they had to sneak into Israel. And risk being, I guess, put in prison if they were caught in the war. Now just to be clear, your grandfather did not go in the second part. His friends went,  his classmates, went and people around that.

Did he want to go to Israel? Did you speak to him about it?

Aron Heller: As far as I can tell, he never did. His lesson from the war was, “I did it, I did what I had to do.I came back, I’m moving on and I’m not looking back.”

But what’s interesting is that, as I mentioned, I started this journey really as individually trying to find out a personal story, so like a family heritage thing, and then as time went on, it expanded to a larger story about the Canadian Jews who served in World War 2, but 17,000 of them. And then it evolved to something even larger, but the Jews in general who served in World War II, which are 1.5 million Jews who served, and anytime I use that statistic, people are blown away because when we talk about World War II, we’re always talking about the Holocaust, about the 6 million Jews killed.

People are just not aware that there were 1.5 million Jews who fought for the various allies, and every single battle and every single front, every single part of World War II, there were Jews there, no matter where you look at it, fighting for the allies.

And not only that, 250,000 of them died in combat.

So these are people who did not die in the camps, they died fighting for their countries, but they also felt that they had a duty to protect their fellow Jews.

And one of the things before I really dove into this, my grandfather didn’t say much, but when I did ask him why he volunteered in World War 2, it was very simple.

“We got to get even with Hitler.” That was his driving force, and as the dozens of other people I’ve interviewed over the years, I’ve heard that repeated so many times from so many different people.

Ellin Bessner: Your book not only talks about your grandfather, but this band that you called it, of people who he intersected with or maybe had gone to school with, who were part of Israel’s War of Independence. Maybe there’s one or two of them still left, and that’s about it as far as I am aware. How did you piece that together?

Aron Heller:  Well, first of all, there are none left. I mean, there really are no World War II veterans left, maybe one or two, but at this stage they’re gonna be 104, 105 years old. So that’s why there was also the sense of urgency throughout my career, I was a longtime reporter at the Associated Press, and I focused on Holocaust survivors, and I really felt a sense of urgency to get their stories before it was too late.

And World War II veterans, it’s even more so because they had to be at least of military age. So, Yeah, my grandfather and the guys around him, they really were these last witnesses to this era, and that’s why it’s been so important for me to get their stories.

The connecting theme is my grandfather, and that’s where the story starts, that’s where the story ends, and through him, he’s sort of like the storyteller, he’s sort of like the

connecting tissue, if you will. And through that story of trying to figure out what happened to him and his wartime service, I eventually got into three main storylines.

The first one was this Dakota flight in 1948 in Israel, which had five overseas volunteers.

And it was a crucial moment in Israel’s War of Independence, and it hasn’t been reported on before, really is quite unknown in Air Force literature anywhere else. Anytime I asked somebody in Israel, they had no idea about it, no recollection of it, but it was quite significant and so that’s all original reporting about these 5 foreign volunteers, 3 of them Canadian who were named Wilf Canter, Fred Stevenson, and Willie Fisher.

And Wilf Canter was a friend of my grandfather’s, that’s the connection that we made initially, and that’s really what took off this whole journey to begin with.

The second part of the book is focused particularly on the Canadian contribution.

There’s a similar theme to all these different elements here.  I focus on what has been overlooked. There’s been overlooked the Jewish contribution to the Canadian contribution. Often when we tell the narrative of World War II, it’s through the American prism or through the British prism, and so this, the second part is focused on the Canadian perspective and all the characters there and their various connections to my grandfather.

And then the final section is about this museum in Israel that I also stumbled upon back in 2015 and and chronicled this whole establishment dedicated to the Jewish fighters in World War II, and that’s the museum in Latrun in central Israel.

It hasn’t really opened officially yet, but it is there, and people in Israel can visit it and learn about this untold story about the Jews and their great contribution in World War II.

Ellin Bessner: Is your grandfather in the museum?

Aron Heller: It’s an interactive museum, so they have different things, but they have a database, and he is in the database. I put his story in there and I put in also those of all of his friends and all of his comrades, and the museum itself has got all various wings, and one of them is devoted really to that early part of the war and the Canadians are featured prominently there.

Ellin Bessner: OK, so we don’t want to give a whole spoiler alert, but this crash of the Dakota, you’ve been reporting on this in pieces, I know because I’ve read your pieces in the New York Times and what have you for a long time about what happened to this plane in the desert in Israel in the early days of the of the war and these Canadians who died. What you can tell us is when you pieced it all together and you found out that it was preventable. This sort of mechanical problems with the aircraft. Are we allowed to say this? How comfortable are you telling me a bit about it? I mean, that is sort of giving closure to a mystery that’s 78, 77 years old.

Aron Heller:  Yeah, basically, I mean this Dakota, I’m sort of being cagey about it because we’ll find out the information in the book, but it goes along the same thing I was talking about before, the overlooked part of it, the mundane nature of war, and that sort of mirrors the experience of my grandfather in World War 2, which we’re always imagining all these heroics, but it’s actually the mundane and the daily things that happen that are really what keep the war moving and what is essentially the the core of the experience.

And the same thing with Israel’s War of Independence, we know all the heroics, and they’re in the book, but even a plane crash, which seems like it was something just purely mechanical mistake that happened.

It was very important because it reflected the climate of the times.

I mean, these were people who were really a ragtag group of guys put together.

I mean, I had somebody telling me about these planes that they were basically like hunks of metal flying in the sky, and it’s just amazing the odds that they overcame and the dangers that they faced, and I have all these statistics about basically in in World War Two, how hard it was to survive Bomber Command, and then when you find out afterwards, the people who fought in Israel’s war of independence in ‘48, it might have even been worse in the sense as far as the casualty figures.

I mean, we’re talking about a full 1% of the people who lived here died in that war.

So what I try to do is tell a single story that’s reflective of a larger one that captures sort of like the monacity at the same time, but also just, you know, how wild and crazy these years were, how dangerous they were, and how heroic the people took part in it were.

Ellin Bessner: Now speaking about war and 1%. This book lands after two years of Israel being in its existential war since October 7th, where you lived through it and reported on it to us and others. How can you see the two types of fighting or the two types of wars and, and sort of sit with both of them? Where does it fit into where your book was to where we are now?

Aron Heller: Well, I mean, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because when I first started this journey, I really looked at it sort of like an ode to the past. I looked at it as sort of like giving honour to the greatest generation, and the original manuscript that I did was completed before October 7th. It was really just the story of my grandfather and his friends. 

Then what happened is, you know, I don’t know if it’s, you know, they say life imitating art or the other way around, but it just happened that I really feel like it became more relevant, because even without planning to, as this war was going on, and I was finishing up the book and finishing and adding the last parts to it, you realize all these things that are mirroring each other, and so, I think the larger theme there is that for basically 80 years now, my generation, maybe the generation before me, we sort of lived in this anomaly of Jewish history as we sort of had this situation where we had a Jewish state, where generally was not under existential threat.

I mean, Israel’s had a lot of problems, had a lot of terrorism, but it hasn’t had an existential threat, and Judaism in the world too, Jews have lived relatively, especially in historical perspective, very, very antisemitism free compared to history.

And now all of a sudden we’re snapped back to these same insecurities that the characters in the book had in the 1940s.

So, in a way, what we’ve had the last two years here, we’ve never felt anything like that before in our lifetime, but working on the book reminded me that we have felt similar things in the past, and that gives you a little bit more, I guess, a little bit more courage to to stand in the face of it and say we’ll get through it.

Ellin Bessner: Now your book is in English about Canadians, but you’re in Israel, you may be aware that there has been an effort for many months now by a certain group in Canada to list all the Canadians who served in the IDF during the last two years and dox them. And taking most of their information from our reporting, as they have. And basically Israel’s soldiers now there’s a report the Hind Raja Foundation in England is trying to make Israeli soldiers arrested wherever they land, or ex-Israeli soldiers wherever they land. So being an Israeli, part of the IDF-become a hugely bad thing.

Here comes your book and talks about Canadians who did the exact same thing, and the Israeli government ignored them for 60 years. We have to say they didn’t really appreciate their service on the same level as their own people. They didn’t give them a medal, they weren’t noticed for years. So, I mean, you said it’s an inspiration, but you know, being an IDF soldier today is a bad word, and your book says it’s a good word.

I’m just wondering how that sits?

Aron Heller: Well, first of all, I don’t know if these people who make that list are watching your show because that means they’re gonna add me to the list.

You just got me on the list. Thanks.

Ellin Bessner: I didn’t say you served. I said some people served.

Aron Heller: Well, in my book, it says that I served, so if they read the book, they’ll see that I did, and I served 3 years in the army in the 1990s, and I’m very open about it and forthcoming about it and describing my experience. And that’s another part of the book also realizing how in many ways my grandfather’s experience in World War II echoed those of his father, by the way, who served in World War l for Canada, and my own in the Israeli army. And so like, you know, we’re not a very militant family, as you can imagine, and yet we find ourselves having 5 generations of Hellers in wars,  in battle, and you know, that’s just the reality of our existence over the last century.

I served in the army in the 1990s. I didn’t have a war to fight then.

I wasn’t in a combat role. It affected me greatly, just like it did him and affected sort of a bit of the direction of my life. But, to me, you know, serving in the military, especially if it’s a mandatory one, it’s not like you really, there’s no news there.

Yeah, the news is, if it seems to be bad to serve the Israeli military, then that should be the same for every other military, and that’s the same double standard that we talk about that Israel often has, and we sort of have to deal with.

This whole last two years, there is a shadow of antisemitism overall, the reaction to it, and it’s something that you just have to deal with. It’s unfortunate and it’s kind of shocking in many ways to a lot of us, but it’s a new reality.

Ellin Bessner: Let’s go back to your grandfather. Did he get to see any of the galleys or any of the early drafts of the book?

Aron Heller: He knew I was working on the book, and the first publication I had was in 2019 in The New York Times Magazine. I wrote a story basically with my grandfather and about Wilf Cantor, and that’s when I was really nervous about how he would respond to that. But, you know, he came along and he did enjoy it at the end, he appreciated it, and he shared the story and the pictures.

I think his agenda was always to talk about others rather than himself, but he was very proud of being able to get the stories out of his friends like Wilf Canter and Sumner James, and all the other people who are mentioned in the book. He’s very proud about the Canadian contribution to the war and about how they also affected Israel later on.

He just was not the kind of guy who liked to talk about himself too much, and so I hope I’m doing service to him by using him sort of as our narrator, so to speak, or connecting thread, because the book is not necessarily a biography of him, it’s just sort of like through his window, seeing that whole experience and what a huge impact it had on the lives of him and all of the members of the greatest generation.

Ellin Bessner: OK, finally, this book is for a North American, Canadian audience, but it also has a heavy Israeli component. It lands as there’s been 900+ Israeli soldiers killed since October 7th, either on that day or in battle, and how the country has been going to the funerals and the leviyahs, and it’s a whole thing, and I’m wondering what you think the legacy of these people who were killed in the war is, in Israel, or do they not know about the Mahalniks and people like your grandfather’s friends, who some of them are on Mount Herzl too.

Aron Heller:  Well, in general, it’s not a known story. The larger story of the Jews who served in World War II is not well known because the larger narrative was about the Holocaust, about his victims. After World War II, the focus in Israel was on, so like the Ghetto uprisers, and, you know, the paratroopers and all the people who were in the resistance, and not necessarily on those who fought in the war, and those who did eventually came to Israel, and then they became sort of like the icons of Israel.

They were less concerned about those who went back to their countries.

So I’d say that their legacy, I’m hoping will be now more well known, but in Israel, it’s not a very strong theme.

What is a strong theme in Israel is this sense of camaraderie in battle, and if there is a legacy, I think from these last two years is that perhaps we had gotten accustomed to the easier life where we thought that it was sort of Israel was a given and that these ancient threats against Jews were, were gone and this was a slap that woke us up and told us that unfortunately, it looks like living in Israel, you’re gonna still have to live by the sword, and we’re still gonna have to serve.

I mean, I mean, when I was a kid, there were always these stories about, “Oh, when you, when you’re old enough, you won’t have to go to the army cause they’ll be at peace. That’s the story they told us. There’s even a term in Israel for the children of post 1973. After the ‘73 war, it was like, all right, we’re done with that, we can move on.

And 50 years later, we’re not there, and it’s sad, and it’s difficult, and it causes a lot of grief both here and in the Diaspora, but there I think is a recognition that we’re gonna have to take up arms when we when we need to, and that’s what’s happened in this war, and that’s what these people did in World War 2 as well.

I hope that this book in some way is a bit of a morale booster after two years of really struggling through all this, because it shows that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Ellin Bessner: And it’s important that these voices are shown in this special niche in history, which was covered a little bit by a Canadian professor, of course, David Bercuson, who upon whose shoulders your book stands, in the ‘80s, but not nearly the new detail or the personal detail too.

Full disclosure people, I did help Aron with this book a little bit. I’m very proud to help him present it in Canada. And to the world, it’s an important history story that has not been told in such a beautiful way, and you’ve got to buy the book and we’ll put links and come and hear him speak in Toronto! and wherever you can find him.

Thanks so much for being on The CJN’s North Star, Aron, and good luck.

Aron Heller: Thanks, Ellin, for having me and thanks for all your help throughout this journey. It really is great to be able to share this with you.

Ellin Bessner:  And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of Northstar made possible thanks to the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin charitable foundation.

You can find out more about aron Heller’s new book and learn where he’s doing some book talks this month by going to the links in our show notes.

Our show is produced by Andrea Varsany and Zachary Judah Kauffman.

Michael Fraiman is the executive producer, and the theme music is by Bret Higgins.

Thanks for listening.

Related links

• Learn more about Aron Heller’s new book Zaidy’s Band and see where he’s holding book talks across Canada from Nov. 11-19.
• Read Aron Heller’s tribute to his late grandfather Mickey Heller, in The CJN archives.
• Read Aron Heller’s coverage from Israel of Oct. 7 in The CJN.

Credits

• Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
• Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
• Music: Bret Higgins

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