

1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland, effectively starting the Second World War. They moved to the father’s hometown of Wierzbnik, the Jewish section of the larger industrial city of Starachowice. The family, which included a younger sister (Ida) and a younger brother (Harold), lived in Warsaw until Mary was about five years old. Her father, Gershon Rubinstein, was a butcher. Her mother was Rose Rubinstein, a dressmaker. Mary (Manya, Malka) Weinrib (née Rubinstein) was born in Warsaw on July 16, 1925. “That’s her pinch-me moment,” her daughter, Susan Gitajn, said. According to her children, she believed her greatest achievement was keeping the family intact. Weinrib had seen loved ones separated and lost to each other in the war and the Holocaust.

“With our father lost, it was one less person to help keep that unit together,” said Allan Weinrib, a film producer. In the 1970s, she did remarry to a widower who passed away from an illness some years later, but the death of her first husband left her so heartbroken she never quite recovered from it. Mary and Morris got married right after the war and soon immigrated to Toronto. The couple had met as teenagers during incarceration at the wartime work camps in Starachowice, Poland. After her husband Morris’s sudden death in 1965, Mary was left with three young children and a variety store that her husband had owned and managed. Reunited and married in 1946, Mary and Morris emigrated to Canada. Palmer remains the only surviving member of ELP, and said recently that he's not sure what's next for Asia following the death of singer/bassist John Wetton earlier this year.Mary Weinrib, here with Morris, endured the labour camp at the munition’s factory in Starachowice and the concentration camps at Auschwitz, where she met and fell in love with her husband Morris Weinrib, and at Bergen-Belsen, where she was finally liberated in April 1945. There's also the matter of the state of his two best-known former bands. With Asia, Palmer employed a less experimental style that proved he could truly play anything, not matter how simple or complex. With ELP, Palmer blurred the lines between rock and roll and jazz and pushed the envelope of what many drummers thought was physically possible. Palmer has been in two bands that were contemporaries of Rush and his name is often brought up in discussions of the best drummers to emerge in the 1970s alongside Peart. Lee, Lifeson and Carl Palmer go back quite a ways.
