DA pays tribute to father who survived concentration camps
Jeff Rosen writes a memorial to dad in a Facebook post detailing Holocaust survival story and life he built in U.S.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen penned a moving tribute to his late father Morrie on Wednesday, a week after the Holocaust survivor died at the age of 78 following a nearly two-decade cancer battle.
The remembrance, posted on Rosen’s campaign Facebook page, detailed how Morrie Rosen spent his first few years of life in Nazi concentration camps in the early- to mid1940s, then moved to Wisconsin — hence the family’s Green Bay Packers fandom — and then to Los Angeles where he started his family.
“My father was the strongest and toughest man I knew,” Rosen wrote.
Morrie Rosen was born March 4, 1940 in the Wodzislaw ghetto amid the Nazi occupation of Poland. As a toddler he was rounded up with his mother, Sally, and aunt Rose and separated from his father, who was killed at the Czenstochau concentration camp.
His early childhood was spent in three concentration camps in three years, including the Bergen-Belsen camp that Jeff Rosen visit edin 2015. The district attorney, who was named after his murdered grandfather, said his grandmother and aunt are the reason he exists.
“My grandmother and aunt suffered cruelty, hardship and deprivation to protect my father and keep him alive. Keeping my father alive is what kept them alive,” Jeff Rosen wrote. “If he had died, so would they. Without these two righteous women, my father would have died, and I would not be here.”
Morrie Rosen survived another four years in a German displaced persons camp after the war, where his mother met another Holocaust survivor, whom she married in 1949. They emigrated to the United States and settled in a small attic above a grocery store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where the local Jewish community “graciously sponsored them,” Jeff Rosen wrote.
Eventually, Morrie Rosen married and moved to Los Angeles because of wife Harlene’s teacher job in that city. He landed a job as an office manager for Dynasty Shoes, where he had a 35year career.
“My father was warm, concerned about others and very funny. His colleagues loved him, and he loved them,” his son wrote.
That warmth extended to Jeff Rosen and his brother, Jason, for whom Morrie Rosen was a rapt and attentive father, and later, grandfather to four granddaughters between the two sons.
And that Packers affinity? It continued in the form of yearly trips to watch them play in person.
“While the Packers did not always win, my brother and
I knew that we were winners because we got to hang out with our father,” Jeff Rosen wrote.
He said that his family’s history in part drove him to become a prosecutor. In addition to the Germany trip three years ago, Jeff Rosen also flew famed Auschwitz survivor and Holocaust historian Renee Firestone on April 23 to share her story with his office and other county leaders to ensure that genocide is remembered by younger generations.
But Rosen couldn’t be on hand to host Firestone as he had planned. He flew to Southern California to be with his ailing father, who died the next day after an 18-year battle with stomach and colon cancer, “peacefully surrounded by his family.”
Jeff Rosen reflected on his father’s optimism in the face of the tragedies he lived through.
“Many times, my father told me that he felt like Lou Gehrig, ‘the luckiest man on the face of the earth,’ “he wrote. “My father’s memory is a blessing to me, my family and all of his friends.”
The Rosen family asks that in lieu of flowers, well wishers can make contributions to the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.