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True StoriesTom Breslauer: Former
Businessman Recounts
Tom remembers the Germany of his boyhood as a kind of paradise. He grew up in Hamburg, playing soccer under the elevated train, tinkering with his crystal radio set and hiking and biking with the Boy Scouts, unaware that, as Jews, he and his family were somehow different. "Society was completely integrated," he recalled. Tom and his sister, Ilse, were raised by a "warm, loving mother who worked all the time" and took in borders to keep the family together. His father was killed in the Battle of the Somme six months before Tom was born. His mother never remarried. In many ways, "I was to my mother the man she never had," Tom said. He also remembers November 9, 1938, as clearly as if it were yesterday. At the time, Tom was working in his uncle’s shoe factory in Offenbach, being groomed to take over the enterprise. On that day, he and 40 other Jewish neighbors were rounded up by two silent SS men. A few days later, they boarded trains to be transported to Dachau. There, in Barracks 10, Room 28, still dressed in the clothes he had been wearing on his arrest, Tom began four months of incarceration, one among thousands of Jews, repeat criminals, Gypsies and Seventh Day Adventists. There were daily forced marching and calisthenics. "I tried to stay in the middle of a formation, do the pushups, march, whatever we were ordered to do." He worried constantly about what might have happened to his mother and sister. The rise of the Nazis had caught everyone by surprise. "Between 1926 and 1933, there were six or seven elections," Tom recalled. "There were 25 political parties and people were used to many changes in the government. We really didn’t believe [Hitler] would last." As the Nazi party took control, "everything changed. People were suddenly afraid to recognize their Jewish neighbors. My family had lived here more than 200 years. I considered myself German who happened to have a Jewish religion." Despite these changes, his mother insisted she would be all right: "Your father died for the fatherland," she insisted, "Don’t worry about me." In March of 1939, Tom was released from Dachau, and thanks to his mother’s having secured the necessary papers, was able to emigrate to the United States. He never saw her again. Tom Breslauer lived the dream of emigrants to America. He started out with a job in a shoe factory on 14th Street in New York City, living in one room at 137th Street and Riverside Drive. He attended George Washington High School to improve his English. While in New York, he met Lisle Wolfrom, also an emigrant from Germany -- "it was love at first sight" -- married her, and eventually moved to Stroudsburg, where he would go on to found his own, very successful women’s wear manufacturing company named for his wife. The Breslauers raised their two sons in Stroudsburg, and were active in the community. Tom became the president of the synagogue. In 1983, he sold his business and enrolled at New York University, graduating in 1989 with a B.A. in Humanities. That same year, Tom, now a successful American businessman and pillar of his community, returned to Hamburg for the first time since he left it, to learn what had happened to his mother. She had been arrested in December 1941 and sent to a farm. Because she had a heart condition and couldn’t do the work, he assumed she had been executed, one of 6,000 Jews of Hamburg who were killed, including his grandparents and an uncle. Although he still cannot bring himself to speak to Germans of his own generation, Tom Breslauer is making a new career of bearing witness to the Holocaust for young people. He is in demand as a lecturer and has received over 2000 letters of appreciation from schoolchildren and adults. Getting Started Survivors of the Shoah "This project stands as attonement to remembering the past, and to always examining our present." - Steven Spielberg, founder and chairman Service Corps of Retired Executives
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Holocaust
survivor, former businessman, SCORE volunteer, and New York University graduate (class of
1989, at age 71) Tom (Fritz Ernst) Breslauer, 83, has a new passion: speaking to students
in and around his hometown of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, about his experiences. His
story has also been documented by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation’s project which videotapes eye witness Holocaust survivor testimony all
over the world.