Last of the witnesses: Oscar Singer

Oscar Singer recounts his experiences at his Squirrel Hill home, with photos from his youth in the foreground. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

Enduring years of beatings and slave labor, then liberated

By Laura Malt Schneiderman | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Oct. 13, 2024

One of five children, Oscar Singer grew up in a village in southern Poland so small it didn’t even have a post office. His father owned a butcher shop, and their four-room house had stone floors and no plumbing.

One day, the Germans entered the village on motorcycles a little before 5 a.m. “We didn’t fight,” Singer said in a 2023 video for the Eva Fleischner Oral History Project, part of Seton Hill University’s National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education. He was 14 when the Germans invaded. “We weren’t equipped. They just walked in, like neighbors.”

His father was saying his daily prayers in the basement. “My father told me, ‘You keep saying that [praying] all your life and God will help,’” Singer said in an interview with the Post-Gazette, adding, “If God wants you to live, you’ll live.”

His oldest brother died as a Polish soldier fighting the Germans. In the village, the Germans began looting and attacking the Jewish people. Then they forced all the able-bodied men, Polish and Jewish, into slave labor.

At 6 a.m. every morning, the Germans shouted, “Raus!” “In German means ‘you come out,’” Singer said in a 2023 presentation at Chatham University through the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s Generations Speaker Series. They took the men to clear forests and build roads. “You have to go to work or you get killed,” Singer said.

The prisoners endured getting little food or water, frequent beatings and weather already turning cold and snowy.

The Germans told the families if the boys willingly worked in the forests, the families’ lives would be spared. The Jewish boys, including Singer and his brothers, started to run away, but came back out of fear their families would be killed.

In mid-1941, Singer and his younger brother were sent to the Mielic Airplane Factory to work on planes. There, the guards tattooed a “KL” on his wrist, a rare prisoner tattoo standing for “concentration camp” in German (Konzentrationslager). The resulting ink was so deep that Singer was unable to have it removed after the war.

For the first couple of weeks at the factory, Singer got letters from his mother.

Then, silence.

“But hope of seeing his parents, his sister, kept him going,” Singer’s daughter, Lee Fischbach, said in the Chatham presentation.

The rare "KL" tattoo, standing for the German words for "concentration camp," were inked so deeply into Oscar Singer's arm that he wasn't able to have it removed after the war. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

Oscar Singer recounts his years in forced labor, enduring frequent beatings and threats of death. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

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.

Photos of Oscar Singer after the war. The one on the left shows him in a uniform he was given after liberation. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

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 both from dead prisoners and from living ones right before they were murdered. He was given dental tools and did the work while the victims screamed and 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?”

Oscar Singer on his first date with his future wife, Elaine Davis. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

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.

Oscar Singer with his daughter, Lee Fischbach. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

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.