Stories that Touch

This is the story of Jack Sittsamer. I never met him, though more than 100,000 people heard him speak. He passed away recently, another survivor lost to us.

Jack Sittsamer / 100,000 heard his account of Holocaust's horrors

Dec. 30, 1924 - Oct. 26, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
By Sadie Gurman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jack Sittsamer's teenage years were spent in grueling labor behind the electric fences of six German concentration camps. He once spent days in a crowded railcar without food, water or sanitation. Some nights, he risked his life to eat. He saw the chimneys of gas chambers and mountains of shoes belonging to the dead. He watched his father die.

He survived.

Mr. Sittsamer's story is one of perseverance. But for most of his life, he couldn't tell it.

"It was painful," Mr. Sittsamer's son, Murray, said. "No one else could ever understand how it was. It was so unbelievable that people don't believe it."

But by the end of his life, Mr. Sittsamer, of Squirrel Hill, had put a human face on the horrors of the Holocaust, recounting his odyssey for more than 100,000 people in classrooms and auditoriums around the country.

Mr. Sittsamer, who gripped listeners with his life story and warned of the dangers of unbridled hatred, died yesterday of cancer. He was 83.

Mr. Sittsamer struggled to talk about his past, once passing off a blue K and L tattooed on his wrist at a concentration camp as a girlfriend's initials, Murray Sittsamer said.

But his difficulty talking about his experiences during the Nazi invasion of Poland and in some of the worst death camps eventually transformed into a desire to keep the horrors from happening again.

He believed that could be done through education, and as the president of a group of 150 local Holocaust survivors, Mr. Sittsamer relived his experiences to give young people a personal account of the nightmares of the war. Alarming as they sometimes were, those close to him said, Mr. Sittsamer's accounts were also rife with hope and optimism.

Born on Dec. 30, 1924, in Mielec, Poland, into a family of Orthodox Jews, Mr. Sittsamer experienced anti-Semitism early in life in the town of 5,000 Jews and 10,000 Catholics.

Nazis stormed his hometown in 1939 and set fire to all three synagogues, killing Jews who were inside and shooting those who tried to escape the flames.

The family lived in their home until a March morning in 1942, when Nazis beat down their door and forced them to march with the rest of the town's Jews seven miles to an airplane hangar. Mr. Sittsamer's father, Moses, a World War I veteran with a wounded leg, could not keep up. He was shot and killed while Mr. Sittsamer looked on.

Later, Murray Sittsamer said, when the Nazis sought volunteers to dig a mass grave for the 300 killed during the march, Mr. Sittsamer offered to bury his father.

That was the last time he saw his family. His mother, Perla, brother, Israel, another brother, Josef, and two sisters, Devora and Gitla, were separated and sent to camps where they were slain.

Mr. Sittsamer spent the next years in deprivation, enduring the rigors of several concentration camps, including Mauthausen, one of the worst. Luck, he would say, and the hope that he would be reunited with his brother, Israel, kept him alive.

He was finally liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945. He weighed 72 pounds. He sought refuge in Eggenfelden, Germany, until July 1949, when the United Jewish Federation helped him move to the United States.

In Pittsburgh, he worked for 36 years as a sheet metal worker at Tyson Metal Products and learned English during night classes at Allderdice High School.

He began speaking out about his experiences more and more after his retirement in 1986.

"The message that he sent to people was more about living than it was about anything," said Amy Hartman, whose play "Mazel" was influenced by Mr. Sittsamer's life. "It was about living well and loving well and appreciating what you have."

Mr. Sittsamer also helped the needy while working with the Jewish Assistance Fund as a board member and trustee. In 2006, he won the prestigious Jefferson Award for Public Service for his willingness to retell his experiences.

"He was on a mission to educate young people about the horrors of the Holocaust so it could never be forgotten and it would never happen again," close friend Edgar Snyder said. "It was spellbinding to hear him speak."