Michael Stolowitzky

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Michael Stolowitzky (also Michał Stołowicki , Hebrew רות אלמוג, born February 1936 in Warsaw ) is a Polish - Israeli travel agent and survivor of the Holocaust .

Life

Michał Stołowicki was born into an upper-class Jewish entrepreneurial family who worked in the metal trade and with mills. When the German attack on Poland in 1939, his father Jacob Stołowicki was in Paris on business and was now stuck there. He was later murdered by the Germans in Auschwitz . Michał Stołowicki's mother Lidia (1896–1940), née Drejzer, fled with him to Vilna , Lithuania , which has now been added to the Soviet Union due to the Hitler-Stalin Pact . She wanted to emigrate from there, but suffered a severe stroke in 1940. The family's nanny , Gertruda Bablinska , a Catholic, promised the dying woman that she would bring her son to Palestine . From then on she passed Michał off as her nephew, whose upbringing she had taken over, she had him baptized and acted as an altar boy. After the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941, the two faced renewed danger when the Germans imprisoned the Jews in the Vilna ghetto and announced the death penalty for those who hid Jews with them. The hauptsturmführer Karl Rink , who himself had a 1924-born daughter with his Jewish wife, had once prevented with a passerby control that Michał's Catholic identity has been questioned, and thus saved him from the Holocaust.

After the war ended, Bablinska and Stolowitzky ended up in a DP camp in Germany for two years , from where they tried to get to Palestine. After a vain voyage on the Exodus ship , they succeeded in doing this on their second attempt in 1948. Stolowitzky grew up with his foster mother in Jaffa and, after completing his military service in the Israeli Navy, worked as a tourism clerk in the Israeli tourism industry. He was a soldier in the 1956 Suez War , 1967 in the Six Day War and 1973 in the Yom Kippur War . In 1977 he got a job from an Israeli travel company in the USA, where he organized pilgrimages to the Holy Land until his retirement in 2002 . Stolowitzky worked as a manager at American Express and founded the American Tourism Society (ATS) in New York in 1989. He is co-director of an organization that wants to promote the efforts for world peace and understanding through tourism.

Bablinska stayed in Israel, where she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1963 . Only a very small part of the family assets deposited in Switzerland before the beginning of World War II was restituted to Stolowitzky, the family palace in Warsaw was expropriated by the People's Republic of Poland and later became the seat of the Polish Ministry of Agriculture . In France he found traces of the life of his father, who believed he had lost his family in Poland and married an Italian during the war before he was deported.

Around 2000, Stolowitzky decided to tell his story himself. The Israeli bestselling author Ram Oren prepared the life stories of Bablinska, Stolowitzky, Moshe Segalson and Helga Rink into a biographical novel, which was published in 2007 and translated into several languages. Oren himself describes his book as a "non-fiction book". Elie Wiesel called the text “written with impressive talent and suspense, this true story will appeal to many”.

In the period that followed, Stolowitzky also traveled to Germany to speak as a contemporary witness .

Stolowitzky lives on the Upper East Side of New York, is married and has one son.

Interviews

literature

  • Ram Oren : I dared to do it for you. One child, one promise, and one dramatic rescue. In collaboration with Michael Stolowitzky. Translation from English Evelyn Reuter. Brunnen Verlag, Giessen 2010, ISBN 978-3-7655-1767-9 . [The English edition is translated from Hebrew by Barbara Harsha].
    • German new edition under the title Gertrudas Promise. A dramatic rescue for a Jewish boy . Dumont, Cologne 2015
  • Gertruda's Oath. Teacher's note . Random House. Handouts for using the book Gertruda's Oath in school lessons (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Doug Chandler: The Hero Of An Israeli Best Seller , conversation with Michael Stolowitzky, in: The Jewish Week , September 20, 2007
  2. ↑ Aryeh Segelson: Belev HaOphel . Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002 [“In the Heart of Darkness”] (he), here after the review: Na'ama Lanski: Tell My Daughter Her Father Was Not a Murder . In: Haaretz , July 19, 2007 (English)
  3. ^ Opinion / Staff Report: My Nanny saved me from the Nazis . In: New York Post , November 15, 2009. [Michal Stolowitzky reports, story is as told to Alison Rosen . ] (English)
  4. ^ Gordon Thomas : Operation Exodus: from the Nazi death camps to the promised land: a perilous journey that shaped Israel's fate . Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2010
  5. ↑ Michael Stolowitzky . Board of Directors, IIPT - International Institute for Peace Through Tourism
  6. ↑ Ram Oren: Gertruda's Promise . 2015, pp. 230–232
  7. ↑ Gertruda's Oath . Blurb of the English edition at Penguin
personal data
SURNAME Stolowitzky, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stołowicki, Michał
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Israeli tourism clerk and survivor of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH February 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw