Eric Lipetz
Every Jan. 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, where more than 1.1 million people lost their lives during the Holocaust in World War II. Since 2005, the United Nations General Assembly has commemorated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember the six million Jews that were murdered and promote education about the Holocaust, so it never happens again.
Today, there are fewer and fewer survivors, and soon we will be turning to videos, audio notes and documents for testimonials from those who survived. We spoke with Eric Lipetz, 86, who escaped Nazi atrocities and, after tumultuous years filled with risk and uncertainty, came to the United States with his family to start anew.
Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Lipetz remembers having a happy and tranquil childhood until the German invasion in 1940 changed the course of his family’s faith. He was only 4 years old, but remembers vividly running out of his house with his parents and two older brothers as German bombs fell.
“My childhood ended when the war started,” says Lipetz. “We went from being happy with my parents, brothers and other relatives around, to being on the run knowing that somebody was trying to kill us.”
His father, whom Lipetz remembers as a bright and courageous man, arranged for the five of them to arrive to Spain, take a train to Portugal and then a ship to America. But Europe was quickly invaded with Gestapo officers (the Nazi secret police) and, if captured, they would end up in concentration camps.
Lipetz’s paternal grandparents weren’t so lucky. Based in Lithuania, when German soldiers knocked on their door, they instantly shot his grandmother and took his grandfather to Auschwitz, where he was killed. If they had stayed in Belgium, Lipetz's family would have been separated and taken to concentration camps where, it is highly probable they would not have made it out alive.
Stories of personal horror abound for Lipetz, including one about a family that was friends with his parents. The Germans killed the husband, kicked the mother with her two small children out of the house and put them in a truck where they told her that only one of her children could go with her. Blurred by the madness of it all, she gave away both. She ended up in Buchenwald (a concentration camp in Germany) and was liberated in 1945.
After escaping their home and avoiding capture, Lipetz and his family finally embarked to America, carrying only a few belongings. In fact, he remembers wearing the same clothes as when they left Antwerp. Despite the long and ardous journey, Lipetz remembers a poignant moment of joy and relief: his mother’s teary eyes seeing the Statue of Liberty in New York for the first time and exclaiming, “We’re free! The Nazis can’t get us here. We’ll be okay.”
Adding to their hardship, the family learned upon disembarking, that they had to return to Belgium because of the Jewish quota, a discriminatory quota that limited the entry of Jews., Lipetz’s quick-thinking father arranged with his brother, a wealthy man who was in the textile business and had mills in the Philippines (a US protectorate), to get him a job there.
They spent four years in Manila (the capital of the Philippines). In December 1941, the U.S. went to war with Japan and the Lipetz were captured and placed in Santo Tomas, a large university in the Philippines that was turned into a camp (Santo Tomas Internment Camp). They were in a tent not really knowing what was going on, when their father heard a Japanese soldier speaking in English. Lipetz recalls his father telling the soldier, “We understand that you are at war with the United States, but we are not Americans, we are from Belgium and we were passing through the Philippines when the war started.”
The soldier let them go on the condition that Lipetz’s father would hire some Filipinos and teach them how to use the bristles (Lipetz’s father had a bristle business before fleeing Belgium) to clean Japanese rifles.
His father, hesitating to collaborate with the enemy, had no choice but to agree. As they left the camp and were walking back to the apartment they were living in Manila, they realized they were being followed by a group of Filipino freedom fighters who wanted the help of Lipetz’s father in fighting the Japanese. Lipetz’s father’s plan was to clean Japanese rifles up and down until a few bristles would get stuck in the barrel. After a few uses the rifle will either misfire or blow up on the Japanese’s faces.
The Lipetz had a hard time in Manila, especially because they never had enough food. “Food got more and more scarce, we were living on rice and some fish. Most of the rice had all kinds of worms, so my father used to say ‘Well, at least you got some meat there,’ he made a joke of everything, he just tried to make the best of it,” Lipetz says on testimony for the School District of Palm Beach.
When the war was finally over, they were able to return to New York, where Lipetz enrolled in public school at the age of 10. He graduated from college and built his career on Wall Street, got married and had three children. He lived in Israel for a time and moved to South Florida after his middle son died of brain cancer.
Lipetz says that although he tries to remain optimistic about the future, he is very concerned about the rising wave of anti-Semitism that has surged recently. He has decided to spend the last part of his life talking about the Holocaust, his experience during the war and how important it is to be strong and fight anti-Semitism.
“I want younger generations to learn to be good people, to respect democracy and be thankful for what they have, that they’re not entitled for anything, except for being good citizens,” says Lipetz.