*Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet, Hope Anita Smith, and Michael “Moishe” Moskowitz, 2017*

Author’s Note

By Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet

On January 29, 2019, my father died in his home at the age of ninety-two. He needed to tell his story, and like many survivors, struggled to do so for years. Later in life, his stories came, and came, and came. He shared them with his children, his grandchildren, and his friends. He spoke to middle school students, many of whom had never heard about the Holocaust. His is a story of survival, hope, and inspiration. It needs to be told.

My father was born in Kielce, Poland, on August 17, 1926, between the two great wars. Kielce was known for the depth of its hatred of Jews throughout generations. Jews were concentrated in small towns around the city. Despite extreme anti-Semitism, my father always spoke of the safety and love he felt in his home with his mother, Golda; father, Gimple; brother, Saul; and sister, Bella.

In the fall of 1939, when my father was thirteen, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. By the spring of 1941, about twenty-eight thousand Jews were locked in the Kielce Ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1942, his mother and sister were sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. His father joined an underground Polish resistance and died fighting the Nazis. He and his brother were left to clear the ruins of the ghetto. They were later sent to a forced-labor camp and subsequently separated. My father believed his brother died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Holocaust. He never saw any of his family again, but the hope that he would find them sustained him and kept his spirit alive. He endured the forced-labor camps of Skarzysko-Kamienna and Pionki, and the concentration camps of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz III (also known as Monowitz or Buna), and Buchenwald, as well as two death marches in the winter of 1945.

It was during the first death march, on a cold winter morning in 1945, that my father met the brave women of Czechoslovakia.

As a child, I remember my father asking customers as they came into his dry cleaner’s: “Are you from Czechoslovakia?” When I asked why he did this, he would remark that he never met a “Schindler” while he was in the concentration camps, but he will never forget the bravery and kindness of the Czech women who risked their lives. Despite the armed Nazi guards, the women threw loaves of fresh, hot bread to concentration camp prisoners locked inside cattle cars. This story—the image of it raining warm bread—became my fable of hope during my childhood. “Where there is life, there is hope; where there is hope, there is life,” my father always said. What he experienced in Czechoslovakia helped restore his belief in the goodness of human beings.

On July 4, 1946, he barely escaped the worst post-war pogrom. He had been staying with about 180 Jewish survivors in a former parish hall in Kielce, Poland. While my father was away searching for family, a mob of Polish residents attacked the parish hall, killing forty-two and injuring up to forty Jewish survivors. My father knew then he had no home in Poland. Later, while in a refugee camp, he asked a stranger leaving for America to post his name in a Jewish newspaper. His uncle Jacob Moskowitz, his father’s youngest brother, who had escaped to America before the war, was living in Los Angeles. Uncle Jacob saw my father’s name among the survivors and sponsored him to come to America. The only time my father cried when telling his story was when he described seeing his uncle for the first time at the train station, looking back at him with his father’s eyes.

*Michael “Moishe” Moskowitz and Leticia Reyes Moskowitz, 1953*

My father’s second life began in Los Angeles, California. He met my mother, Leticia Reyes, a beautiful Salvadorian woman, in ESL class. Despite speaking different languages and having different religions, they fell in love, married in 1950, and raised four children.

Tragedy and trauma visited my father once again in 1991. His youngest children, Richie, thirty-two, and Brenda, thirty, died six weeks apart. Once again, my father recovered. He lovingly cared for my mother during her long decline with dementia. He fought back bravely from several medical setbacks, including his last heart attack at the age of ninety-one.

My father retired from Baronet Cleaners at the age of ninety-one, where he worked side by side with his son Gary.

*Gary Moskowitz, Michael “Moishe” Moskowitz, and Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet, 2017*

He found new joy in retirement, the “miracle” of FaceTiming his grandchildren, and in sharing his life story with young people. He inspired all who knew him with the sparkle in his eye, his empathy, his indomitable spirit, and most of all his enduring hope.