I am the youngest son of Miklós Mandel and Veronika Schwartz. My parents survived the Holocaust and went on to create a wonderful life together after they met in 1945 in Hungary. My mother wrote A Survivor's Memoir [ISBN 0-88947-369-2, Volume 15h], which was published by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) in 2001. Excerpts of it were republished in 2019 in two chapters of the Azrieli Foundation anthology, Confronting Devastation: Memoirs of the Holocaust Survivors of Hungary (Ed., Ferenc Laczó). I tape-recorded my father's incredible story and made this site to honour his memory.
I grew up in Chomedey, Laval, north of Montreal, earning my Bachelor of Arts degree (with Honours and Distinction) in Psychology from Concordia University. Through much of the 1990s, I lived on the West Coast, first in Vancouver, where I completed my graduate studies at UBC, and then in Palo Alto, where I was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Stanford. From 1998-2001, I lived in London also spending much free time in Paris. Soon after the twentieth century abruptly ended, I returned to Canada and took up a faculty position in Victoria at UVic. A few years later, after being tenured, I moved to Toronto, where I now live with my wife, son, daughter, two cats, Winston and Theodor, and several unnamed tropical fish and shrimp. The end.