My Dad's story

Although I was reluctant to do so initially, I agreed with my brothers that it is OK to put my Dad's story on the blog, so here it is. He truly was a remarkable man, and we loved him dearly. Many thanks to Les who put together most of this; I added some embellishments after watching his interview with UCL ...

Dad didn't talk to us much at all about his life during the war until around the time the film Schindler's List was made and he became part of Steven Spielberg's project to catalogue the testimony of all the then survivors of the Holocaust. Dad was also one of the people interviewed as part of a similar project at University College London.

He was born in Lask, a small village near Lodz in Poland, in December 1927 in a Jewish quarter known as a “stettle”. He had two sisters, Sara, older than him and Rosa who was younger. He was nearly 12 years old when the Germans invaded Poland.

Dad's father, was taken away by the Germans for labour as soon as Poland was occupied and he never saw him again. The rest of Dad's family was rounded up by the Nazis and put into the Lask Ghetto. In August 1942 the Lask ghetto was liquidated and his mother and his younger sister were taken away to Chelmno. Dad and his older sister, Sara, were strong enough to work and so went off to the Lodz ghetto to join labour gangs. In fact Dad was lucky to acquire skill as a builder with a capable engineer, and this team of builders did a lot of work outside the ghetto; at one point even building a Gestapo prison!

No doubt this is where Dad's work ethic that we all came to know must have started. While you could work you were not “taken away” - there were constant "selections" made in these ghettos.

Just before the Lodz ghetto was wound up in August 1944, Sara got appendicitis, and without any proper hospital facilities in the ghetto, she never really recovered. They both ended up in a camp called Buna (part of Auschwitz-Birkenau) where he continued to work but Sara, due to her condition was not so lucky and he never saw her again.

On New Year's Eve 1944/5 Dad and the other survivors in Buna were forced by the Germans to march to another camp, Dora, in the Harz mountains, a journey of some 4-5 weeks, in the freezing cold. Any who fell on the way were killed and Dad almost didn't make it. He only survived the journey because he was helped by someone else he knew from Lask to stay on his feet. This person, I do not recall his name, was a musician, and like Dad he also managed to survive the war and moved back to Lask. When Dad had a job earning money in Israel, one of the first things he did was to buy a Saxaphone and send it back to Poland for this man. Perhaps here we can see the start of the generosity that we all came to know.

At Dora, they worked loading the infamous V-bombs onto trucks. They did not stay long.

From Dora, Dad was transported to Belsen where they were locked up and starved by their Hungarian guards. Dad was so weak when the British liberated the camp that he was unable to get off the bunk he was lying on. Had the British arrived even a day later, we probably would not be here today.

When Dad was well enough he went to the Red Cross to try and track down his family.Finding that they were all dead, he decided not to go back to Poland and, after hanging around Allied DP camps in Germany, he was recruited and transported to Palestine by Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organisation. They were trucked through France to Marseilles, and put on a boat. The British turned them away to Cyprus, but eventually the British left and he made it to Israel to fight in the 1948 war of independence.

One day during that war, when training in the morning with his company, Dad twisted his ankle. That very afternoon, his company was ordered into an attack and he was not allowed to go because he couldn't march. If he had gone with them then, probably we would not be here today as every man in his company was killed.
Unable to march Dad was sent to the kitchens and perhaps it is here that he found his calling. He was now just 21 years old and, for the previous 9 years, had never had what most of us would consider to be proper meals.

After the state of Israel was created, Dad went to Switzerland to study to be a chef and get his Cordon Bleue certificate. He went back to Israel where he met and married my mother, and then in 1954 came to England with her as she was pregnant and wanted to be at home with her family.

After working in London for a few years, Dad took over the Carmel Hotel in 1962/63, renaming it to the New Carmel Hotel. It was a Victorian style building across 4 floors, with 30 bedrooms, part of a large block of hotels right on the cliff top in Cliftonville, a rather genteel "suburb" of the popular seaside town of Margate, which is in the extreme southeast of England. He stayed for the next 49 years; more of his life was spent here than anywhere else.

Here is a picture of him at work, pretty much as I see him in my mind's eye: