Miss Tam-Tam
01-06-2007, 11:17 AM
The story of Samuel Kreitzman is utterly heartbreaking. It demonstrates dramatically how the oppression of a people continues to be felt for generations:
<<From Auschwitz to a lonely end in Newark
Saturday, January 06, 2007
He was a complicated man.
His rabbi said it. His best friends said it. His daughter, too.
Samuel Kreitzman, a survivor of the Holocaust and an ensuing 60 years of private torment, was laid to rest in a customary plain, pine box in the Rheim Ahuven Cemetery, in an industrial section of South Newark.
There were prayers from his rabbi, Samuel Bogomilsky, and remembrances from a grand nephew, Dov Mayer Kreitzman, a rabbinical student from Lakewood. And as he was buried among the Steiners and Rothsteins of old Newark, everyone talked about the irony of it all.
Samuel Kreitzman, who saw his entire family -- save one brother, Jacob -- marched off to the crematoriums of Nazi concentration camps, lived to be 85, only to die alone in an accidental apartment fire.
The blaze at the Ivy Hill complex in Newark burned so hot, Samuel Kreitzman's most identifiable mark -- the 141188 tattooed on his left arm -- disintegrated into ash.
That was just the final irony of Samuel Kreitzman's life.
"I had this funeral for all the people who loved him," said his closest surviving relative, his daughter, Natalie, 50. "They loved him, but he wouldn't allow me to love him. For all he lost, he never figured out how to love his own family. That was what the Holocaust did to him."
There were two faces of Sam Kreitzman, the public and the private -- one comic, one tragic.
"He was everybody's friend. Everybody loved him," said Max Brownstein, whose friendship with Kreitzman began when they both owned homes in Irvington.
"He had a garden where he grew sunflowers like moons. Vegetables. Soured pickles. He fed the neighborhood."
"Yeah, he was Mr. Life of the Party ... to everybody but his family," said Natalie Kreitzman, while sitting shiva in her Iselin home. "But to me and my mother (the late Ann Altshuler Kreitzman, his wife of 36 years), he was a very sad, very sick man. You never knew what was coming next. It was like what the Nazis did to him. In that respect, we lived in our own camp. We tried very hard to understand his internal destruction, but it was beyond our grasp."
At the funeral Wednesday, Yishai Benavraham of the Mount Sinai Congregation, where Kreitzman was a member, told of how Kreitzman was in line at a crematorium when a Nazi officer pulled him out and told him to go work at another officer's house.
"He was that close to death. He said, 'God protected my life. My life is a miracle.' So he wanted nothing bad later, just to make people happy."
Natalie Kreitzman produced the "only letter he ever wrote to me. It says, 'Life is a miserable affair, but you have no choice but to go on.' He was severely depressed. He hid this from everybody but his family. They knew, they just didn't talk about it."
Instead they talked about how he was a complicated man.
He handed out money in welfare lines and gave generously to Jewish charities, but was a hoarder and junk collector. "He'd give out $50 bills to bums on the street, but he lived in clutter," his daughter said. "He had 75 cans of tomato paste in his apartment when he died. He was always afraid to have nothing again."
He was a faithful temple-goer who often questioned whether God abandoned him.
"He would say, to me, 'Nati, God is not around.' This is what I grew up with," Natalie said.
He attacked his work as a roofer with the energy of men half his age, and drank just as hard.
"He said to me, 'When I die, put me in the back seat of the car and drive past every bar I frequented,'" Natalie said as she took out her mother's old address book and read off the names: "John's Tavern. Sherry Hill. The Sportsmen's Club. My mother had all their phone numbers so she could find him. This is where he lived. One place used to send a cab for him. They loved him there. They loved him because he bought for everybody."
Still, "My father went to work every day."
It was this work ethic that saved Kreitzman's life.
"They moved us from work camp to work camp," said Joseph Abramowicz of Brooklyn, who grew up with Kreitzman in Poland, and worked with him as a Nazi slave laborer. "Sam was a hard, hard worker."
The last stop was Auschwitz. "ARBEIT MACHT FREI." (Work shall set you free).
But the Soviets did that, on Jan. 27, 1945, and Samuel Kreitzman came to America.
His grand-nephew told this story at his funeral.
"After the camp was liberated, Sam's brother Jacob said to him, 'We're all we have left. Let's never lose each other.' Sam replied. 'No. I can't bear to watch you die, too.' And he went his own way."
He went his own way. Another euphemism for a complicated man who endured, carrying the weight of death and torture.
A personable, generous man, one man forever changed by the demons of world history. But also a self-destructive, lost soul who could never shake those demons.
At any given moment, he could be one, or none, of those things.
In one life, he was all of those things.>>
Mark DiIonno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com or (973) 392-1728.
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/diionno/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/116806183446970.xml&coll=1
<<From Auschwitz to a lonely end in Newark
Saturday, January 06, 2007
He was a complicated man.
His rabbi said it. His best friends said it. His daughter, too.
Samuel Kreitzman, a survivor of the Holocaust and an ensuing 60 years of private torment, was laid to rest in a customary plain, pine box in the Rheim Ahuven Cemetery, in an industrial section of South Newark.
There were prayers from his rabbi, Samuel Bogomilsky, and remembrances from a grand nephew, Dov Mayer Kreitzman, a rabbinical student from Lakewood. And as he was buried among the Steiners and Rothsteins of old Newark, everyone talked about the irony of it all.
Samuel Kreitzman, who saw his entire family -- save one brother, Jacob -- marched off to the crematoriums of Nazi concentration camps, lived to be 85, only to die alone in an accidental apartment fire.
The blaze at the Ivy Hill complex in Newark burned so hot, Samuel Kreitzman's most identifiable mark -- the 141188 tattooed on his left arm -- disintegrated into ash.
That was just the final irony of Samuel Kreitzman's life.
"I had this funeral for all the people who loved him," said his closest surviving relative, his daughter, Natalie, 50. "They loved him, but he wouldn't allow me to love him. For all he lost, he never figured out how to love his own family. That was what the Holocaust did to him."
There were two faces of Sam Kreitzman, the public and the private -- one comic, one tragic.
"He was everybody's friend. Everybody loved him," said Max Brownstein, whose friendship with Kreitzman began when they both owned homes in Irvington.
"He had a garden where he grew sunflowers like moons. Vegetables. Soured pickles. He fed the neighborhood."
"Yeah, he was Mr. Life of the Party ... to everybody but his family," said Natalie Kreitzman, while sitting shiva in her Iselin home. "But to me and my mother (the late Ann Altshuler Kreitzman, his wife of 36 years), he was a very sad, very sick man. You never knew what was coming next. It was like what the Nazis did to him. In that respect, we lived in our own camp. We tried very hard to understand his internal destruction, but it was beyond our grasp."
At the funeral Wednesday, Yishai Benavraham of the Mount Sinai Congregation, where Kreitzman was a member, told of how Kreitzman was in line at a crematorium when a Nazi officer pulled him out and told him to go work at another officer's house.
"He was that close to death. He said, 'God protected my life. My life is a miracle.' So he wanted nothing bad later, just to make people happy."
Natalie Kreitzman produced the "only letter he ever wrote to me. It says, 'Life is a miserable affair, but you have no choice but to go on.' He was severely depressed. He hid this from everybody but his family. They knew, they just didn't talk about it."
Instead they talked about how he was a complicated man.
He handed out money in welfare lines and gave generously to Jewish charities, but was a hoarder and junk collector. "He'd give out $50 bills to bums on the street, but he lived in clutter," his daughter said. "He had 75 cans of tomato paste in his apartment when he died. He was always afraid to have nothing again."
He was a faithful temple-goer who often questioned whether God abandoned him.
"He would say, to me, 'Nati, God is not around.' This is what I grew up with," Natalie said.
He attacked his work as a roofer with the energy of men half his age, and drank just as hard.
"He said to me, 'When I die, put me in the back seat of the car and drive past every bar I frequented,'" Natalie said as she took out her mother's old address book and read off the names: "John's Tavern. Sherry Hill. The Sportsmen's Club. My mother had all their phone numbers so she could find him. This is where he lived. One place used to send a cab for him. They loved him there. They loved him because he bought for everybody."
Still, "My father went to work every day."
It was this work ethic that saved Kreitzman's life.
"They moved us from work camp to work camp," said Joseph Abramowicz of Brooklyn, who grew up with Kreitzman in Poland, and worked with him as a Nazi slave laborer. "Sam was a hard, hard worker."
The last stop was Auschwitz. "ARBEIT MACHT FREI." (Work shall set you free).
But the Soviets did that, on Jan. 27, 1945, and Samuel Kreitzman came to America.
His grand-nephew told this story at his funeral.
"After the camp was liberated, Sam's brother Jacob said to him, 'We're all we have left. Let's never lose each other.' Sam replied. 'No. I can't bear to watch you die, too.' And he went his own way."
He went his own way. Another euphemism for a complicated man who endured, carrying the weight of death and torture.
A personable, generous man, one man forever changed by the demons of world history. But also a self-destructive, lost soul who could never shake those demons.
At any given moment, he could be one, or none, of those things.
In one life, he was all of those things.>>
Mark DiIonno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com or (973) 392-1728.
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/diionno/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/116806183446970.xml&coll=1