Oscar Singer is celebrating 100 years with two cakes. The Holocaust-surviving soon-to-be centenarian will eat the first one with friends and family in Sarasota, Florida, where he’s been wintering. The second cake will be enjoyed by Singer with beloved company upon returning to Pittsburgh.
Both cakes, Singer, said, will have a vanilla base with strawberry filling. And, at each celebration, there’ll be tuna, salmon, bagels and blintzes. Whether the latter is homemade, however, is debatable.
“We’re going to look for Golden’s blintzes — they’re hard to find here,” Singer’s daughter Lee Fischbach, 66, told the Chronicle before an interruption.
“My daughter won’t let me cook here. I’m too messy in the kitchen,” Singer said with a laugh.
Singer and Fischbach spoke with the Chronicle by phone from Sarasota.
Ten years ago, he and his wife moved in with their daughter. Two-and-a-half years later, Singer’s wife died.
“It was right after that that I decided, ‘Oh my gosh, time really is wasted,’” Fischbach said.
Growing up, Fischbach and her two siblings heard little about their father’s earlier days. He rarely mentioned his imprisonment and forced labor in the Mielec, Wieliczka, Krakau-Plaszow, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz camps, or how he was beaten by Nazis inside the Mielec airplane factory. He barely discussed his relocation to a German tank factory near Dresden, or how he worked in its kitchen and smuggled a potato for his brother but was discovered by Nazis who sicced their dog on him, leaving Singer with leg wounds that still remain.
He hardly noted that after the war he was held in Landsberg displaced persons camp, how he and his best friend at the time, Max, returned to Max’s pre-war home in Radogoszcz, near Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Poland, how Max saw someone who used to work for his family on the farm, how Max asked the man if Max’s father had left anything from before the war, how the man reentered the house, exited with a shotgun, killed Max on the spot and told Singer, “We don’t want you Jews. We don’t want you to come home. The Germans gave us your property.”
Singer, who married an American-born woman and helped raise three children in Denver, Colorado, rarely referred to his birth in the Galician village of Radomyśl Wielki, how his father was the area’s kosher butcher, how every Shabbat the rabbi and townspeople would come to their four-room cottage with stone floors for meat, or, how even after the war Singer never went home.
To those he knew in Colorado, Singer was a food service professional.
Between 1951 and 1970 he operated Buddy’s Italian Restaurant: one in Denver, one in Littletown. Then, between 1970 and 2016, he ran Singer’s Gourmet Catering. Singer worked until he was 90, when a fall forced his retirement. He rehabbed the injury and avoided addressing the past.
After the Holocaust, he had the inked number on his arm removed. Not so for the “KL” tattoo, which German Nazis also seared into his skin to prevent escape from the Konzentrationslager (concentration camps). The injection was too deep.
As an adult, Singer’s stories were few. But some tales emerged.
“He was always having bad dreams at night, and he would have night terrors,” Fischbach said.
Years ago, little was known about PTSD, and “my mother just felt that speaking [about the war] would be the worst thing for him.”
Singer wasn’t exactly free to stop and spout. As a grown man, he often worked two, even three, jobs at once. It’s difficult imagining when he would have had the time to talk about earlier horrors, Fischbach continued. But also, “I think emotionally, my mother felt that he was too fragile to deal with it.”
A lifetime of episodes were dammed, but Singer’s story surfaced in spurts.
“When I was a little girl, I had a lot of freckles. I hated my freckles, and he would say, ‘Oh no, no, no, you look just like my sister. She had lots of freckles, too.’ And that was all that he would say before he would start to cry,” Fischbach said. “We did not know a lot about my dad and his experiences. We just knew every once in a while he would share a bit of information, and then he would go back into his shell, and we wouldn’t be able to ask anything or know anything until the next time that it just came up.”
Finally, after her mother died, Fischbach altered the narrative. She pressed her father to speak. And he did. At Chatham University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and in classrooms across south Florida and western Pennsylvania, Singer shared his life story.
He talked about his parents and four siblings, who were all killed in the war. He recalled post-war Munich, and being hired to wash dishes in Hofbrauhaus. He described learning to cook non-kosher sausage and spaghetti in Modena, Italy. And, to every willing listener, Singer happily related his love of food.
“I like food. I enjoy it and I don’t look too bad. I’m not too heavy,” he told the Chronicle. “I never ate food when I was in the concentration camp. You couldn’t get it. Only on Christmas they would give us ham, but it was just the bones and the fat.”
Singer, who frequently mentions God and growing up in an observant home, acknowledged that ham is definitionally treif “but you had to eat it if you wanted to live.”
And no matter what, life must be extolled, he continued. “People have so much hate. They’re killing each other and that doesn’t make sense. We’re going to run out of cemeteries pretty soon.”
As the Holocaust survivor reaches 100, life, death and the divine are frequent topics.
“I always pray to God. I go to daven every Saturday morning,” he said.
The comment spurred a memory.
Singer said he can still see his father standing in the basement of their home in September 1939. It was morning, the German Nazis were nearing and Singer’s father had donned a prayer shawl and phylacteries: “I said they’re going to see you in the tallis and tefillin. They’ll kill you.”
His father told him not to worry, that God will help and the messiah will come.
“Moshiach is coming,” Singer said with a chuckle. “I’ve been waiting for 100 years.”
The retired restaurateur and caterer is set to celebrate his birthday on May 10. At both of his parties there will be vanilla cake with strawberry filling. There’ll be tuna, salmon, bagels and blintzes. Along with plates of food, Singer will be surrounded by family and friends. He might even share that May 10 isn’t the day he was born.
Those records were destroyed in the war, he said. “I chose May 10 because that was the day the Russians came in. They came in that day and they opened the door for us in Theresienstadt.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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