At the factory, Singer’s large hands were clumsy handling the small airplane parts. “The Nazis would scream obscenities and hit him with a rubber hose or whip just to terrorize him and to prove they’re in control and dominant,” Fischbach said.

They threatened to kill him. “But one day they said, ‘He’s a big guy and we need bodies.’” So they put him to more strength-based work.

His older brother was sent to work on a farm grinding corn for bread. One morning, the brother was groggy from lack of sleep and his feet slipped into the grinder. “There was no help and they took him out. His feet was gone already and they took him someplace,” Singer said in the oral history.

There, he was murdered. “In German, they say, ‘You have to die like a dog.’ That’s what they keep telling to us. Working or dying. Working or dying.”

In 1943, Singer and his younger brother were sent to Wieliczka, where they worked for six weeks in a lightless salt mine near Krakow.

Later that year, they were deported to Plaszow concentration camp, then by train to Auschwitz. “It was very bad,” Singer said in the oral history. “People were dying, half of them, in the car like cows.

“When we come in to Auschwitz, some people, they picked for you to work, and some people, they picked for you to die,” Singer said. The brothers were separated. Singer was given a shallow tattoo of his prisoner number that he was able to have removed after the war.

Infamously, the sign over the Auschwitz gate read “Arbeit macht frei” (“work makes you free”).

“All I [can] tell you is what they told us: [You’re] gonna go to work. [You’re] gonna be good workers. They’ll let you live,” Singer said in the oral history.

“But they didn’t let you live. They were lying to you.”

Singer was assigned a night job removing gold teeth from prisoners who had just been murdered while armed guards stood nearby. Thirty or 40 people were bused to the site every night to do the work. “By the end of the night,” Fischbach said in the presentation, “half of the people couldn’t do it. They just said, ‘Shoot me.’”

“I think I’m going to be dead, too, after I finish,” Singer said in the interview with the Post-Gazette. “I couldn’t say anything ... All I want is survive.” He said he kept thinking, “God will help. I maybe survive.”

“He would have to grapple with his morality every day,” Fischbach said in the presentation at Chatham.

“They [the Nazi guards] wanted to dehumanize you and make you into an animal. You make a decision: Can they take away your humanity? They can take away your hair. They can take away your food. They can take away your family. But can they take away your humanity?”

One night, some prisoners attempted an escape, only to find the Nazis waiting at the gate. After that, food was entirely cut off for a week. Every morning at roll call for some time, the guards would hang 10 random prisoners.

In mid-1944, Singer and his brother were moved to a tank factory. Because Singer had trouble working with small parts, the Germans made him a dishwasher in an officers’ restaurant and he was able to sneak quick bites of food and take food back for other prisoners. Once, he was caught trying to smuggle out a potato. The Germans set dogs on him, badly scarring his leg.

In early 1945, the fortunes of the war turned. Singer and his brother were sent on a death march to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. For six weeks, Singer walked with little food or water and inadequate clothing.

At some point, his brother couldn’t go any further. As the Germans urged Singer forward, his brother told him not to wait. Singer “chose to move forward, once again having to deal with that all his life,” Fischbach said in the presentation at Chatham. His brother was killed.

At Theresienstadt, Singer cleaned streets, latrines and barracks, and was forced to build the last of the cremation ovens. “If they had not been liberated on May 9,1945, all the prisoners would have died,” Fischbach said in the presentation.

One morning Singer woke up and the Germans had fled in the night. The Russians had come.

Had the camp been liberated four days later, Fischbach said, Singer would have died in the crematoriums that he was building.

He survived, but after the war, he had nothing left — no family, no home, no education, no money and no country.

He was 19.

Singer took a boat to British Palestine, but the boat was not allowed in. He ended up in a displaced persons camp in Cyprus, where he caught typhoid.

Returning to Germany, he became a dishwasher at a Munich restaurant. Recognizing some talent, the restaurant promoted him to cook and paid for him to train in Modena, Italy.

Eventually he moved to join a distant relative in Denver, where he opened an Italian restaurant, Buddy’s Drive-In. “I like to eat,” he said with a grin. But he remembered hunger, and made sure to donate unused food to the poor.

At home at night, he would scream in his sleep.

If asked about his family, he would cry.

Nevertheless, Singer did his best to push away the past. “You live today and forget about yesterday,” he said. “What good is it to be angry?”

After having back surgery, he came to Pittsburgh in 2016 to be with his daughter. His wife, Elaine, died in 2019.

Singer said he lived by the motto of treating others as he would have liked to have been treated. “If you become your enemy, they’ve won,” he said.

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

Correction, posted Nov. 27, 2024: This story incorrectly described the circumstances in which Oscar Singer was made to extract gold dental work from prisoners. He was forced to do so after prisoners were murdered in front of him.

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