Tailor Harry Drucker (Aug. 31, 1923 - May 27, 2024), of Squirrel Hill, died May 27 at the age of “a hundred and a half,” as he put it. For most of his life, he could not speak about his experiences in a German-run work camp during World War II.

“There are ones who can talk about it. I can’t,” he said in a June 17, 1991, oral history interview available through the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

The middle child of five in Lubatowa, Poland — a small town about 230 miles south of Warsaw — he turned 16 the day the German army invaded the country. His father was a butcher and Drucker was apprenticed as a tailor, said his daughter, Jean Reznick, 67, of Squirrel Hill.

In May 1942, the police gave his family 30 minutes to collect their belongings before deporting them to nearby Rymanow, where they lived in one room of a house with another family. “Everybody was scared constantly,” he said.

He and his brother were forced onto a road work crew. His father was sent to dig holes in the woods. Later they learned what the holes were for — mass graves.

“And one morning we wake up … and the town was surrounded by the Ukrainians. They worked for the Germans. All our streets were surrounded and everybody was pushed into the town square,” he said.

He, his brother and about 60 others were separated from the main group. His parents and sisters were sent to the train station. “I think they sent them to Treblinka (a death camp). I never saw them again,” he said. The older people were “packed in trucks and taken to the woods and shot.”

He and his brother continued to work on highways for about three months until some Germans came and asked if any tailors were in their group. Drucker volunteered. He later said it saved his life.

He was sent to a small camp outside of the Szebnie labor camp nearby. There, he and about 36 Jewish tailors made German uniforms. Occasionally, he made leather coats and once he upholstered a car.

“My brother stayed on the highway. I never saw him again,” he said in the video, adding, “Somebody after the war told me that he contracted typhus in a camp and died.”

Over time, about 24 of the tailors were sent to the main camp, where conditions were harsher. Those remaining were hungry but had enough food to survive.

Twice, a Nazi overseer found a pretext — wiping his white-gloved finger along a surface in the barracks and finding dirt or discovering that the tailors had burned wood to warm themselves — to have each of the tailors flogged with 25 blows each.

By the time the Russian army approached toward the end of the war, a man named Turk was in charge of the tailors. Drucker found out after the war that Turk’s brother was married to Jewish woman in London. “He was kind, a little bit,” Drucker said. “More of a human being. … If not for him, I would not be here.”

The men could hear the shots and screams as the Nazis and their collaborators murdered everyone in the main camp. Although Turk was ordered to kill the tailors, he took them with him to various places in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war to avoid the oncoming Russian army.

“Then one day we decided to run away, all 12 of us,” Drucker said. “And one night, like the guard was in the front [of the building] and we went out the back door and through the alleys and the little trees and … into the mountains and woods.”

Reznick said the back door had been “miraculously” left unlocked, and the tailors surmised that Turk had allowed them to escape.

They joined with partisans in the woods.

One time, they ambushed and killed a group of Germans along a highway. When the main army realized what had happened, it arrived with artillery. Drucker and his group fled, running almost two miles into the mountains.

As artillery exploded around them, they made it over the mountains “and fell over practically” from exhaustion. Then the partisans dispersed. “Everybody was on his own,” Drucker said.

Surrounded by Germans for about eight days, there was “nowhere to get food or anything. I did nothing for eight days. Ate snow and you could find some nuts from trees.”

Eventually, a farmer familiar with the terrain guided them to safety.

After the war, Drucker continued a precarious existence. He caught dysentery at one point. At another, he and some others trapped and ate a small goat in the countryside.

By autumn 1946 he was living with a cousin in Breslau, Poland. They decided to cross to the American sector. They stopped a Russian truck on the road and offered money and vodka for a ride to Berlin. To elude border guards, they hid behind oil barrels in the truck. Once in Berlin, they got someone to smuggle them into the American sector.

“Then things got better,” he said. ‘At least we were more free.”

In 1949 when he was 25, he came to the United States, helped by his uncle Nathan Drucker, of Pittsburgh.

The younger Drucker worked at Kaufmann’s department store as a men’s tailor, then opened his own shop in 1963, H. Drucker, at 2025 Murray Ave. in Squirrel Hill, his daughter said.

He married and had two children. In the oral history interview, he expressed his love of his family and for Israel — “It means at least the Jewish people have their own home.”

An exacting tailor who measured and remeasured to get an ideal fit, Drucker sewed until the last days of his life.

He counted I.D. Wolf of Kaufmann’s, local bookmaker and racketeer Tony Grosso, Pirates shortstop Gene Alley and Steelers running back Rocky Bleier among his customers. He sewed the zippers onto Fred Rogers’ knitted sweaters for the PBS children’s TV program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

The Reznicks and a family friend and house cleaner, Tracy Musilek, of North Braddock, recalled Drucker’s quick walk, his love of jokes and his fondness for cards, playing pool and gambling. Gin was his favorite card game, and he played the lottery every day, they said.

One of his granddaughters is a teacher, and the family used to give presentations on the Holocaust for her middle school students. When the students asked Drucker how he survived, he often came to tears.

“There were days when I just didn’t want to live, that the lucky ones were the ones who died,” he sometimes said.

Yet he continued to think the best of people. “You do the best you can do in any circumstances,” he said on the oral history video. “Be good to everybody. ... 95% of people are decent everywhere.”

Laura Malt Schneiderman, lschneiderman@post-gazette.com.

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