Oakland grocer survived horrors of Auschwitz
When Eugene Rosner was liberated from the Holocaust by American soldiers in 1945 — after years of being forced into slave labor in the Auschwitz concentration camp — he thought it was too good to be true.
“An American soldier gave him a potato, and he said, ‘No, I’m not eating the potato. You eat it,’” recalled his daughter, Candi Shapiro, of Oil City, Venango County. “He was still a little skeptical apparently. So, after the soldier ate the potato, he ate it. That’s when he realized they were liberated.”
He had reason to be distrustful. The 19-year-old Romanian Jew had spent most of his teen years as a prisoner of the Nazis and had already escaped death several times, including once by slipping out of the entrance to a gas chamber.
Mr. Rosner and others were liberated along a Nazi-driven death march that began several days earlier at the infamous Polish concentration camp, where 1.1 million of the camp’s estimated 1.3 million Jewish prisoners had perished between 1940 to 1945.
He lost nearly all of his family in the Holocaust, including his brother, who had survived in the camp for years only to presumably die during the final march.
“They were walked out of the camp, and his brother was with him then. They walked for days and days and days, and if you fell, they shot you in the head,” Mrs. Shapiro said. “My dad thinks that his brother probably died on the walk, because he never saw him again.”
A year after his liberation, Mr. Rosner immigrated to Pittsburgh.
The 93-year-old died Feb. 10 of congestive heart failure at the Greenfield home he shared with his wife for 68 years.
Mr. Rosner was born in Bixad, Romania, and his father was a strict Orthodox Jew who hoped his son would become a rabbi, Mrs. Shapiro said.
“My dad resisted that,” said Mrs. Shapiro, who recalled a visit from her paternal grandfather to Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s.
Mr. Rosner was taken from his hometown by the Nazis along with his brother, mother, aunt and cousin when he was about 14 or 15 years old, his daughter said.
“They rounded up all of the people in town and took them to the synagogue, where they kept them for several days,” she said. “And then they were put on cattle cars. When they got off, his mother was holding his aunt’s baby and they were separated. He was put in another line, and he never saw her again. He thinks she was killed right away because she was holding the baby.”
Mr. Rosner met Irene Cichocka shortly after he came to America, while he was working at a grocery store in Market Square. She was a Polish Jew who escaped German clutches once and fled for the remainder of the Holocaust.
“He said, ‘The very minute I saw her, I knew I’d give up 20 years of my life to marry her,’” Mrs. Shapiro recalled.
The couple married in January 1950 and recently celebrated their 70th anniversary.
In 1949, Mr. Rosner opened Gene’s Food Market in South Oakland, at Kennett Square and Ophelia Street, which he and his wife operated until 1975.
When he opened the small grocery store, there were six other similar shops in the neighborhood, his daughter said.
But Mr. Rosner persevered, waking at 5 a.m. every day to visit the Strip District to hand-select fresh meats and produce before heading to Lieberman’s Bakery in Squirrel Hill for the baked goods that he would sell. He made taffy apples and sold them out of the back of his station wagon at Forbes Field.
Eventually, his was the last store standing.
“His strength and work ethic were incredible. My father worked like a dog,” his daughter remembered. “I don’t know how they did it.”
In the early 1970s, he became particularly close to the late Mary Rocco, a customer with mental disabilities who’d recently been discharged from the Polk State School and Hospital in Venango County.
“He would see kids in the store trying to take advantage of her, and he just couldn’t stand it,” Mrs. Shapiro said.
Mr. Rosner took Ms. Rocco under his wing, helping her to open a checking account and hiring her to help deliver groceries. He rented one of his apartments to Ms. Rocco, who became a well-known community advocate, and eventually rented to other former Polk residents in search of homes.
Mrs. Shapiro said her parents rarely discussed their history, and it wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust that she got them to open up. The truth was terrifying.
“They never really talked about it when I was growing up, but I sat them down one day and said, ‘I need to know your stories,’” she said. “I made tapes and asked them to start at the beginning. When I was driving home to Oil City, I was hysterical the whole time because I’d never heard this before.”
Her father was fond of telling people that he graduated from the “School of Hard Knocks,” Mrs. Shapiro said.
“He was mentally a very strong person,” she said. “He was kind and sweet and wasn’t bitter. He never, ever complained about anything, and he told me some really unbelievable stories about things that happened.”
Mr. Rosner survived a heart attack at 50 and other ailments over the years and always bounced back. When he pulled through a serious illness last month, his caregiver Theresa Germany gave him a Superman T-shirt that he cherished, his daughter said.
Through it all, her father maintained his trademark sense of humor, Mrs. Shapiro said.
“His favorite expression was ‘If Hitler couldn’t kill me, nobody could kill me,’” she said, laughing.
Along with his wife and daughter, Mr. Rosner is survived by three grandchildren.
His funeral was Feb. 12.