Abraham Singer was born on September 12, 1946, in the Foehrenwald Displaced Persons Camp, near Munich, Germany, and lived in Munich for the first five years of his life. He shares his experiences living in post-war Germany and the immigrant experience growing up in a survivor community in Vineland, New Jersey.

His father, Wolf Singer, was born in Mościska, Poland, in 1913. His mother, Barbara Singer, was born in Dubiesko, Poland in 1923. “They each survived the war in a separate way. They were both essentially hidden, never went to a camp, and were never arrested by the Nazis. 

“My mother had blonde hair and could speak Polish and German. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she became a mother’s helper in a series of homes. If anyone asked a question about her, she was gone that night. She would hop on a train and go to another town. She felt that if they’re asking questions, it was for a purpose and not a good one. She ended up in Frankfurt, Germany as a mother’s helper and then went to the Foehrenwald Displaced Persons Camp because that’s where the American army was. 

“When Germany invaded Poland, my father joined the Russian army because it was the only army in Europe that took Jews. He was wounded and he realized all he was going to be was cannon fodder. So, he got phony papers and managed to get from Russia back into Germany because he felt the safest place in Europe for a Jew was Germany where they assumed that they already got all the Jews…. He knew a farmer who was anti-Hitler and had done business with him before the war. My dad and his brothers and their father were in the grain business and had customers throughout central Europe. So, my dad went there and the farmer put him up for over four years. My dad lived in the upper barn and never went out to town. Worked on the farm but did nothing else. He never left the place…. And then he ended up at the same displaced persons camp as my mother.

“I don’t know if they met at the displaced persons camp or whether they knew each other from before, but I’m here because they did meet each other.”

Abraham’s younger sister, Rochelle, was born in August of 1950 in Munich and his brother, Jonas, was born in 1953 in New Jersey.

After the displaced persons camp, “We lived fairly nicely in an apartment complex in Munich. It was the only apartment complex that survived and all around it was rubble. The apartment complex had a swimming pool in the back. Next to it was a post office. Next to the post office was a Catholic church. I had a nurse and a chauffeur that would take me everywhere. I was living pretty large. My nurse went to services at the Catholic church, and I would go with her. And then whatever things she had to do, I would tag along. My father was in what was euphemistically called the export/import business. It was the black market. He had a German partner.

“My parents kept kosher. Somebody’s apartment became the synagogue and we went to shul there. We held ourselves out as Jewish.

“We came to the United States when I was five in September of 1951. My father told me he couldn’t look at another German…. And he had two brothers that were already in the United States and he wanted to be with them. He made enough money so that he could come across and he didn’t want to be there anymore…. My mother had a brother, Sam, a sister, Miecha, and my uncle’s girlfriend, then wife, who was also my father’s brother’s daughter, Betty (Balcha). All of these people survived and lived in Vineland or Toms River, New Jersey…. My grandparents didn’t survive. I don’t know in detail nor did I ever ask. My parents were not big talkers and so I didn’t push it. My guess is that they were killed by the Nazis. They never went to a camp but they were shot in Poland. 

“My sister, my mother, my father, and I came on the USS Liberty, a well-known ship for bringing survivors from Europe into America. I only remember two things on the boat. I had ice cream every day. That was a big one. And I was very much focused on being a good American. I studied English every day and I read whatever I could read about the United States because that’s where I was going…. I do remember getting off at Ellis Island and going to a friend of my father’s apartment where we stayed for a few days before we went down to Vineland to live for a while with my uncle, Baruch, my dad’s brother. He lived on a poultry farm and we lived there for a while. We built a house and a farm. And my dad went into the poultry farm business. 

“We had a fairly substantial survivor community in Vineland. So, this helped him integrate into that community. A good number of survivors were poultry farmers. In Europe, my family weren’t poultry farmers but they were farmers. They sold grain. They were in the farming business so they had familiarity with working a farm. And I think my dad went into it primarily because his brothers were in it and also it gave him a level of independence. 

“My mother helped pack eggs, but the main workers were people that my dad hired. My dad worked hard and I contributed. I got the lucky job of getting up early, collecting eggs, packing eggs. As my brother grew older later, he did some work. I think my sister escaped having to work. 

“When I was a little kid, I lived in this neighborhood that was all farms and so I got to know all the little kids that lived on farms in the neighborhood. That was how I spent my time besides whatever I did on the farm…. I immediately started school even though I couldn’t speak English very well. But I had a cousin, Regina, and she was in class with me. I would raise my hand and say something in German and she would translate. That’s how I got through kindergarten. I didn’t lose the year; they passed me. Then I went into first grade and by that point I was speaking so-so English. I had a wonderful teacher from my kindergarten who lived near me and let me come over two or three days a week, Mrs. Giardelli. She was a very, very nice person and she would teach me on her own. I was intent on doing well in school because I saw that as the avenue of moving on up. It wasn’t long after my initiation to the farm, I realized I had one goal, get out of dodge…. So, by the time I was in the middle of first grade, I could speak English fairly well…. My parents learned enough to get by in business and dealing with things. They were not fluent in English. 

“I went to an Orthodox Yeshivah from second grade to fifth grade and I would say 80% if not more of kids that went there were all survivor kids. I had another wonderful teacher, Mrs. Zielinski, who taught me all non-Hebrew studies, so that when I went to elementary school, I was ahead.

“Our next-door neighbors, the Daitches, had numbers on their arm. They had twin children, a boy and a girl. The mother, Musia, was a well-known singer in Poland before the war and then went to a camp, but both of them survived. She would talk about her life in the camp and also her life before the camp. So, she gave me a clearer picture of what Poland was like before and during the war. She also talked a lot more about it than my parents did. And so, her kids knew a lot more and they would tell me. Through all those ways I learned more about it than I did from my parents. 

“The survivor community generally spoke Yiddish to each other. Initially, we didn’t have a synagogue and we would use people’s homes, especially for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Later we joined a synagogue in Vineland. The people that went to these services were all survivors and they all knew each other. Even if they didn’t come from the same place, they all suffered the same issues and therefore they were linked and that was their world. The survivor world was the bulk of my parents’ time. 

“A lot of my friends were survivor kids. But we didn’t think of it that way. We were just there, we were kids. We played ball. We did things that everybody else was doing. As we got older, things were a little different. But as kids, there were a number of survivor families that my parents were truly friendly with and they all had kids and they would take me over there to play with their kids. So, there was a world that I was in that I would call the survivor world…. But I also had friends that lived near me who weren’t Jewish and I would spend time with them. A woman a few doors from us was the cub scout leader and so I joined the cub scouts because that’s what they do in America.

“I played a lot of sports and rode my bicycle everywhere. Initially I played a lot of softball. Played a lot of football. Played a real lot of basketball. As time went on that was the sport that I played probably more than any other. But what sports did, I got to meet a whole lot of other people. It broadened my sense of who was living in Vineland. I got to know the different communities that lived there that weren’t survivor communities. 

“Numerically the largest community in Vineland was Italian. They were second and third generation; very few first generation. They already felt established in town. And generally, there were no major issues. Although once I got to maybe eighth grade, things got a little testier, totally antisemitic. They weren’t subtle. In sixth grade, I went to Max Leuchter grammar school. Max Leuchter happened to be Jewish and had been the newspaper editor. But that didn’t stop this teacher, Mr. Bond. Each day, he had one of the students lead the class in the Lord’s Prayer. I told Mr. Bond, ‘I’m Jewish I don’t use the Lord’s Prayer and so therefore I can’t do that.’ It comes my turn and he says, ‘Now we’re not going to say anything bad about Abe just because his relatives killed Christ.’ Well, that was a problem because some of the kids said, ‘Why did your relatives kill Christ?’ I explained that that was not an accurate statement. And I was lucky enough to have a friend, Richard Yaker, a big kid who protected me and that was kind of dissipated. 

“When I was in ninth grade, the social studies teacher said, ‘Today we’re going to talk about all the great things that Hitler did for the population explosion.’ I said, oh god, and went on with my day. When I get home, my mother says to me, ‘What happened in school today?’ Now this is the first time in my life that my mother ever said that, so I knew that she knew something. I told her about the class. She said, ‘Yeah, I heard.’ My next-door neighbors, the twins, were in the next class and they told their parents and that teacher was gone in three days. But he did have a lot of friends in school and the other ones stayed and I still remember Mrs. Ostrander who hated me and kept me out of the honor society…. So, there were a lot of manifestations of antisemitism. But there were also a lot of Jewish kids. And we weren’t shy about shielding ourselves or having physical issues with people who said bad things to us. 

“One of the things that struck me was how many fights we had in school in Vineland. I remember walking down the hallway one day and some kid knocked my books out of my arms, just for no reason. And we had a fight. At a different time, somebody called me a ‘dirty Jew’ in the hallway and we had a fight. And there was a time when one of our survivor kids was threatened by a bunch of Italians, over something. They came to a sweet sixteen party to fight. And we had this giant brawl and it’s something that I thought was just a part of life. In a way it caused you to work harder and do better because you didn’t want to live that way. 

“My dad passed away when he was fifty-seven from a heart attack. My mother remarried another survivor, Harry Chodosz, who fought with the Polish partisans and was in the Vilna Ghetto…. I had many cousins in New Jersey. I don’t know if all survivor families were like this, but my family was very close. That generation was all close. Even if there was an economic issue, they would help each other because they came from the same circumstances and they came here because of the same circumstances.”

Abraham went to the University of Pittsburgh and then to law school at the University of Michigan, where he met his wife Sherry Steinman Singer. They have two children and three grandchildren.

“I want to tell my story now after listening to others talk about it and also because I read a book, Speaking Yiddish to Chickens. It’s about Vineland. It’s written by Seth Stern and I took his mother, Ruth Green, to the prom. So, it kind of rekindled a lot of memories, especially after speaking with her…. I lived in a unique town. Not many towns had the survivor network that Vineland had. Obviously when I was a kid I didn’t think in these terms. But looking back on it, there is a lot of uniqueness to the experience, and it gave me more of a perspective of what people went through to eventually integrate into American society. 

“I want future generations to know primarily what happened in Europe. My story, I got off easy. Even in Munich, I lived pretty well. Then I came here and my parents took care of us. I managed to go to school. I did decently in school. I’ve had a very nice life. I have a great wife and great kids and great grandkids. But I think the story that shouldn’t go away is how people are evil, the whole European history, and how people ignore evil. If you look at the United States of America in 1940, they knew what was going on in Europe. They didn’t do a thing. The State Department under Roosevelt was antisemitic and acted antisemitically. And I think all that is what people should know and not feel too comfortable with their own circumstances because you never know when bad things can happen.” 

 

Date of Interview: July 25, 2024

Length of Interview: 53 minutes

Interview & Synopsis by: Zieva Konvisser, Zekelman Holocaust Center 

Videographer: Mark Einhaus 

“I want future generations to know primarily what happened in Europe. My story, I got off easy. Even in Munich, I lived pretty well. Then I came here and my parents took care of us. I managed to go to school. I did decently in school. I’ve had a very nice life. I have a great wife and great kids and great grandkids. But I think the story that shouldn’t go away is how people are evil, the whole European history, and how people ignore evil. If you look at the United States of America in 1940, they knew what was going on in Europe. They didn’t do a thing. The State Department under Roosevelt was antisemitic and acted antisemitically. And I think all that is what people should know and not feel too comfortable with their own circumstances because you never know when bad things can happen.”