‘It is time for me to share my story’
Decades later, a Holocaust survivor speaks out
“For many years, I also thought that my experience belongs in the past. I thought the future will be totally different, that people will have learned from our terrible experience. … But I was wrong.”
— Abe Pizam, founding Dean of the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida
If you were beaten and bullied as a child, if you lived for nine years in constant fear of being tortured or killed, if you and your family fled your home, losing everything, and were forced to live in a tent, would you call yourself “lucky”?
Abraham Pizam does. For eight decades, Pizam — founding dean of UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality
Management — did not speak publicly of the terror of his youth. In the big picture of things, he said, he didn’t think it mattered. After all, he survived. Six million Jews did not. “For many years, I also thought that my experience belongs in the past,” he said
Thursday, telling his story to an audience of strangers for
the first time. “I thought the future will be totally different, that people will have
learned from our terrible experience. … But I was wrong.”
It was Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Lake Eola fountain and Dr. Phillips Center and one of the bridges across the East-West Expressway were bathed in purple lights for the occasion. At Maitland’s Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida, 140 people crowded into a small hall to hear Pizam speak; still more watched online.
As the 84-year-old climbed atop a makeshift stage, officers stood guard outside — the most visible evidence of the heightened security measures the center has been forced to embrace. A series of sophisticated bomb threats started in 2017, one of them prompting the evacuation of 300 preschoolers from the campus.
Across the country, the threats, violence and vitriol have only increased since.
Just two weeks ago, a British man took four hostages in a day-long siege at a Texas synagogue. He released one hostage after six hours; three others escaped 11 hours into the ordeal, moments before the FBI rushed the building, killing the gunman.
According to the FBI’s annual data on hate crimes, those targeting the Jewish community consistently account for over half of all religion-based offenses. In 2020, it was 831 — a number widely believed to underestimate the true extent of the problem.
“I decided it is time for me to share my story,” Pizam said. “In this country, we have a constitution. We have this document that declares freedom of religion and equality. And yet now you have people banning books on the Holocaust from schools, people not allowing the education of children. We have people marching in the streets and saying, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ ”
A growing movement, he said, is trying to rewrite history — a history he lived.
Born in a time of terror
By the time Pizam was born in Romania, in the spring of 1937, Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany, a Nazi concentration camp had opened in Dachau, Jewish businesses were boycotted, and books by Jewish authors were publicly burned. In Romania, Fascist political forces were rising in popularity and power, urging an alliance with Nazi Germany.
By the time Pizam was 4, Ion Antonescu, a deeply antisemitic career Army officer, had gained power, leading to the torture and beating of Jews and looting of their shops.
The policies of Antonescu and his enforcers were independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people.
Young Abe’s parents changed his name and registered him for public school, sacrificing a proper Hebrew education, hoping to keep his Jewish heritage secret.
“It did not work,” he said. “I was beaten. I was bullied. I had to wear a yellow star on my clothing” — a badge in the shape of the Star of David. “If you took that off in public, they wouldn’t arrest you. They would just shoot you on the spot.”
While residents of his small Romanian town knew who was Jewish and who wasn’t, Jewish adults pooled their money to bribe local politicians to lie to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, who made periodic visits hunting for Jews.
Every time a stranger knocked on their door, Pizam said, he was terrified. “My sister and I, we lived in that terror every day for years,” he said. “My immediate family — my mother, father, sister, me — we survived. We did not go to a concentration camp. But you lived in constant fear, thinking, ‘When will it happen? It is just a matter of time.’ ”
His paternal aunt, who had married and moved to Poland, was imprisoned at Auschwitz, where she, her husband and children were executed.
When Pizam was 8, his father took him to a local cemetery and had him open a coffin. Inside were brick-like bars engraved with initials that his father said meant “Pure Jewish Fat.” They were, the boy was told, soap that the Germans had made from the bodies of murdered Jews.
In accordance with Jewish law on human remains, the soap had been given a burial.
“Imagine the shock I had as an 8-year-old,” he said.
For decades, the soap story was embraced by Holocaust survivors throughout the world. And though Pizam would later learn it was a myth — propaganda, perhaps, to further terrorize the Jews — that day has stayed with him.
The Promised Land
The end of World War II and the Holocaust in 1945, though, did not end the misery for Pizam and his family. Romania became a communist country, its new leaders nationalizing everything, including the store owned by Pizam’s parents. Overnight, they lost everything they had saved.
They left for Israel, but their ship was intercepted in the Mediterranean. They wound up in an internment camp on Cyprus.
“We survived the Holocaust and avoided the concentration camps only to spend a whole year, living like that, [surrounded by] barbed wire [and] submachine guns ... just for wanting to start a new life in our Promised Land.”
Five years later, having finally reached Israel, Pizam’s father died, leaving his mother without the means to send her son to school. She hoped a distant cousin, living in New York, could help her son find a job there while he was getting an education at night.
A newborn activist
Abe Pizam is now Professor Abraham Pizam, the Linda Chapin Eminent Scholar Chair in Tourism Management at the University of Central Florida. He has a master’s degree from New York University and a doctoral degree from Cornell.
He has researched, lectured and consulted in more than 30 countries and held academic posts in Austria, Australia, France, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovakia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, in addition to the U.S. He has published 10 books.
More importantly, he said, he is a husband, father and grandfather. And now, in the twilight of his life, he is an activist.
“Finally, I am relieved I can share my story,” he said. “Silence is an enemy.”
Where once he was optimistic, though, now his outlook is tempered by doubt.
“This can happen here, believe it or not,” he said. “Looking at the news, look at what’s happening right now as we speak, looking at our country, with both the right and the left becoming more and more antisemitic, I start questioning my hope. And I hope that I’m wrong. And I wish that I’m wrong.”