Crossing Flatbush Avenue, Simcha Fischman

I interviewed my grandfather, Simcha Fischman. My grandfather was born in Poland. After spending the war years in a series of concentration camps scattered across Europe, he immigrated to America.

I was born in the May of 1919 in the small town of Ravitz, Poland. I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family; the youngest of four children. We grew up with little more than the bare necessities but we did not need or expect more. The entire village shared one communal oven. Every Friday the oven would be lit and the villagers’ bread for the following week would be baked. Our cellars were our refrigerators, preserving our food. The little we had was a blessing and we appreciated it as such.
Premium was placed on religious studies and family life. From a young age, small boys were sent to cheder, Hebrew school, where they studied ancient texts and attempted to implement the teachings into their own lives. The girls stayed home and helped their mothers, cleaning, cooking, sewing and looking after younger siblings. We lived a sheltered life, but we were content in our small world.

In 1939 our lives were changed forever.

The Nazis invaded our small town, wrecking havoc; forever destroying our once peaceful, simple lives. The day the Nazis arrived was the last day I saw my parents and my older sister, Miriam. They were taken, rounded up like sheep, and placed into cattle cars leading to unknown destinations. My brother and I hid in a hole behind our stove for three days with minimum food and drink. It was unsafe to come out since a constant stream of Poles kept coming in to our home, vandalizing and destroying our possessions.


In 1950 I set foot on American soil. I was a skeleton; a mere shadow of my previous self. I had endured unthinkable horrors and unfathomable atrocities. I had endured Auschwitz, Treblinka, Madjanek, and Bergin-Belsen. I was a survivor. I had been through hell and I had come back out again. I was a broken man physically but a complete one in spirit. The Nazis had persecuted me because of my religion. They had attempted to eradicate me but I emerged the victor. I am a man with an identity. An identity I fought for. An identity I take pride in.
I came to America to start a new life. I could not go back to Poland after the war. Ever. I could not go back to the land that had stolen my parents from me. The land that had betrayed me. America was a new place, a land of opportunities. I needed to put my past behind me.
It is impossible to go through what I went through and then live a normal life. In the beginning everything is difficult. You forget how to interact with people. You forget societal codes and rules. You get angry when people leave leftovers and when they do not have proper gratitude for the food available. It takes a conscious effort to put the past behind you and to stop looking over your shoulder for the SS guard with his machine gun.
When I came to America I moved in with some relatives from Poland who lived in the Lower East Side. I began learning English and eventually learned to speak it, with barely a trace of an accent. A year later I met and married my wife, who had also come to America after being thrown out of her home by the invading Nazis. Together we moved to Crown Heights. I opened a grocery store, which my wife helped me run. We had three children. We then moved to Boro Park where I became a builder.
America allowed me to start over. It granted me the religious freedom that I had been denied in Poland. I became a citizen and I enjoyed exercising my newfound privileges and freedom by voting. Never did I speak of the holocaust. Not to my wife, not to my kids. I did not want to live in the past, reliving the worse years of my existence. I wanted to move past it and build towards the future. I tried to escape my past but never can it totally leave me. I wake up in middle of the nights, sweating, screaming, in palpable fear that the Nazis are chasing after me and I must run for my life. My experiences are a part of me.
If there is one thing I take comfort in, it is my family. My family is my ultimate way of showing the Nazis that I was the victor in their cruel and vicious game. They wanted to destroy me and my people; to wipe us out, annihilate us. Yet we outlived them. We came to America, the land of the free, and we flourished. My family is my revenge.