At AACI Netanya we heard the amazing story of survival from the Holocaust (Shoah) in Europe during WWII of Rabbi Eli Fishman, ably assisted by his wife Eileen and his son Joseph. His story has been told in the book “On the Wings of Faith,” published by Gefen and co-sponsored by Yad Vashem, the organization for memorialization of the Holocaust in Israel.
Jack Cohen – An Amazing Story of Survival
At AACI Netanya we heard the amazing story of survival from the Holocaust (Shoah) in Europe during WWII of Rabbi Eli Fishman, ably assisted by his wife Eileen and his son Joseph. His story has been told in the book “On the Wings of Faith,” published by Gefen and co-sponsored by Yad Vashem, the organization for memorialization of the Holocaust in Israel.
Eli Fishman was a teenager in September 1939, when his town of Annopol-Rachov in the Lublin District of Poland was occupied by German forces. The occupation was harsh and many were killed, but soon life settled into an existence where one could survive doing labor for the Germans. Eli’s father had a leather goods business and offered to supply the German officers with free shoes in exchange for allowing him to continue his business and employ needed workers. His offer was taken up and it looked as if things would be OK. This situation continued for the first three years of the German occupation.
But, unknown to the Jews in that town the Germans had been systematically deporting and murdering all the Jewish populations of towns in the Lublin area and throughout Poland since March, 1942, an operation known as Aktion Reinhard (named after Reinhard Heydrich). This was the implementation of the decisions made at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in Jan 1942, chaired by Heydrich. The operation was run by SS Officer Odilo Globocnik who was headquartered in Lublin and received direct orders from SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler himself.
However, in October 1942 things changed drastically in Rachov. As a healthy young man Eli was one of 100 young men drafted into a work battalion, while the rest of the Jews of his town, including his his parents and siblings, were forced to march 20 miles to the railway station, never to be seen again. When departing from his mother, she blessed him and told him that she had a premonition that he would survive and God would look after him. Perhaps many other mothers thought that too, but Eli did survive.
Around February 1943 Eli was sent to a work camp at Budzyn, a satellite camp of Majdanek, where he learned to be a bricklayer. As a Yeshiva bocher (student) he had not done manual work before, but he soon took to it and became proficient. At this point he was of value to the Germans and so although he was all alone he was able to survive. The work at the Budzyn camp involved the repair of aircraft for the Luftwaffe and expansion to include an aircraft repair facility. Due to his good work Eli had been appointed assistant to the German civil engineer who was directing the construction of a new hangar. One night Eli was summoned for an emergency because the engineer had been taken ill and they needed someone to supervise the construction. At first he had no idea what to do but he realized that a lot of used oil would be spilt on the ground from the plane engines. So he advised them to pour the concrete so that it sloped downwards, and the oil would run into the center and then into a series of channels that would take the oil away. The engineer was very pleased with his ingenuity and told him that he had saved their lives.
In November 1943 the Germans implemented the next stage of the genocide of the Jews, called the Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival). This consisted of the destruction of all Jewish work brigades in the Lublin area at the Majdanek Camp, where ca. 43,000 Jews were killed in one day. But, the Budzyn Camp was not liquidated because the workers in Eli’s brigade were important to the Luftwaffe because it was their aircraft repair facility.
In the Summer of 1944 Eli was sent to Auschwitz, where the conditions were much worse. He was given paper thin clothes and his shoes were taken away and he was given wooden clogs that cut his feet. He realized that he would not survive long and so after two days (many people survived only 3 days) he decided that he had to find and join the bricklayers brigade. On the march back to the camp from his work detail he flitted from group to group until he found the bricklayers brigade and stayed with them. He had no food rations because he was not registered with them, but the next day when the German Kapo in charge asked if there were any new bricklayers there, he put his hand up. But each of the new people were required to show their bricklaying skills to the Kapo, who clubbed anyone who did not satisfy him. Although he was petrified, Eli passed the test very well and the Kapo patted him on the back and told the crew that from then on he would be their foreman. With this sudden promotion his conditions improved significantly.
There was a large Polish (non-Jewish) group of prisoners at Auschwitz, and they were in charge of the kitchen and other facilities. He was approached by the Polish underground and asked if he would take some Polish prisoners into his brigade. Unknown to the Germans there were many leaders of Poland who after the defeat of the Warsaw uprising in Aug 1944, had been captured and imprisoned as ordinary prisoners. He agreed, and took some 30 important Poles into his crew, that protected their lives. In exchange, they offered him more food. Thus Eli was able to get food for himself and others, especially for the women’s camp prisoners who were literally being starved to death. The Poles cooperated and many women’s lives were saved. In his position of doing construction and maintenance work around the camp he was able to help others by delivering notes around Auschwitz, and was nicknamed “the postman of Auschwitz.”
In the Fall of 1944, when the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Camp was being evacuated, Eli was transferred to the Auschwitz I Camp. One day he was ordered into a jeep by an SS guard and taken to a large mansion in the country. There an elegant woman told him that she wanted to remodel her house and she showed him German magazines and she asked him if he could do it. He had no idea how to do this work, but he was afraid to say no, so he agreed. He assumed she was the wife or mistress of the Camp commandant. He realized that he would need someone who really had that kind of renovation experience, so he asked around and found two brothers, the Steins, digging ditches with other Poles, since they had been captured as officers in the Polish Army. He rescued them, had them transferred and told them what he needed and they said, no problem. And they took a crew to the house and did the work and the lady was very pleased. Due to this work they received extra rations and this saved their lives.
In January 1945, the Russians were coming close to Auschwitz and artillery was exploding all around. The Germans ordered a forced “death march” of all surviving inmates towards the camps in Germany. Many of the inmates were extremely fragile and emaciated, but the Germans were ruthless, shooting anyone who could not keep up. Of ca. 20,000 who started this march from Auschwitz I Eli was one of only 128 inmates who survived to reach Flossenberg Concentration Camp. The beginning of the march was at a furious pace and the guards were shooting anyone who could not keep up. On the march Eli became out of breath and was ready to give up. But his friends the Stein brothers urged him on, and then they pulled him along on his blanket like a sled. As they got far enough away from the Russians the pace slowed and Eli was able to walk again and so survived the march.
Eli was liberated by the US Army at Dachau. After the war ended he was sent to a rehabilitation hospital near Munich where he met other Jews, including a famous Rabbi, Samuel Snieg from Kovno, who started a yeshiva there which Eli joined. When that Rabbi became the Chief Rabbi of the American Zone in the new Germany, Eli became his assistant and translator, serving in that capacity until 1950, when he emigrated to the USA. His story from then on was one of recovery and building a new life, in the USA and then in Israel.
Jack Cohen – An Amazing Story of Survival
