Lillie Fogelman
Leah Fogelman, also known as Lillie, was born on January 20, 1926 in Wyszkow, Poland, about 40 miles north of Warsaw, to Freda (Przetycki) and Mordecai Burstyn. She had four older siblings: Yosel, Froim, Gershon, and Bruchtze (Bracha). The Bursztyns lived above their family tannery business, which had 10 employees and manufactured horse saddles and soccer balls for sale throughout Poland. They were observant Orthodox Jews. Leah’s maternal grandparents also lived in Wyszkow, where they ran the town’s general store.
When the Nazis invaded Poland September 1,1939, Leah’s family fled Eastward on horse and buggy, constantly dodging falling bombs. For three months, they slept in the woods as they made their way from town to town with little food until they reached Bialystok. They lived there with many other refugees in the large hall of a synagogue from January 1940 until March, when they managed to flee across the Russian border. They were arrested by Russian forces and sent to a slave labor camp near the Ural Mountain Range, above the Arctic Circle. They were interned under miserable conditions for six months before being released, and traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway for several months until they reached Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There were so many refugees there that they decided to continue on to Kazakhstan. During this treacherous journey, Leah suffered from frostbite and hunger.
Once they settled in Kazakhstan, Leah got a job as a secretary to the owner of cotton fields, while her brother made boots and her mother operated a soup kitchen for the hungry. They lived there from February 1942 until November 1945, when a German-Russian pact enabled the family to travel to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Kassel, Germany. Although Leah, her parents, and siblings all managed to stay together and survive the Holocaust, her maternal grandparents perished.
One day, while Leah was riding a bus, she saw Simcha Fogelman (also spelled Fajgelman), a young man she had crossed paths with at an information center for survivors on her family’s way to Germany. He had been conscripted into the Polish Army before World War II, and when the Polish army disbanded, he fled to Illya, Belarus, where he lived under Russian occupation for two years. Simcha narrowly escaped a massacre of the town’s Jews in 1942 because he was working at a bakery at the time and hidden by his non-Jewish supervisor. He then escaped and survived the war by joining the Belarussian partisans, and was later a guard for the leader of the Red Army. Recognizing Leah, Simcha asked her if she knew where he and a comrade could find lodging; she suggested the DP camp where her family was living.
Leah and Simcha started doing business together, buying and selling whatever goods they could get their hands on, and their relationship flourished. They were married in April 1948, and their daughter Chaviva (“Eva”) was born in a half-burned-out hospital in the DP camp in 1949. In June of that year, they emigrated to the new state of Israel to reunite with Simcha’s mother and three siblings, who had emigrated to British-Mandate Palestine in 1935. His father died in 1923, when he was just 10 years old, and his younger brother, Leibele (also known as Arieh) was killed during Israel’s War of Independence, valiantly fighting in several battles to conquer the strategic Latrun hilltop. Leah and Simcha had a second daughter, Gila, in 1952. In Israel, Simcha worked as a baker, while Leah took care of the home and children. They lived in Neve Oz, a suburb of Petach Tikva, and then in the city’s Shikun Mapam neighborhood, before moving to the United States on April 18, 1959.
The family settled in Brooklyn, first in Boro Park, and later in Sheepshead Bay. Simcha continued to make a living as a baker until Leah convinced him to buy a knitting mill. He became a mechanic for the machinery and she supervised workers at the company, which was located in Brooklyn Heights. Simcha died tragically on Hoshana Rabbah in 1999, a few days after being hit by a driver while crossing the street to buy groceries. He was 86 years old. Leah was the same age when she passed away in 2012 from an optic aneurism.
Their older daughter Eva, a longtime member of Heschel’s Holocaust Commemoration Committee, and mother of Adam Fogelman Chanes (Heschel 2014), went on to become a psychologist specializing in the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants. She is a founder of the Second-Generation movement, having helped pioneer the development of groups for children of survivors, at the Hillel of Boston University in 1976. She is also a co-founder of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous and a founder of the Hidden Child Foundation. Dr. Fogelman has authored numerous publications, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1995 book Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. She also wrote and co-produced the award-winning PBS documentary Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust. Eva is married to Jewish studies professor, author, and journalist Jerome A. Chanes,
Lillie Fogelman Testimony - The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center
Eva Fogelman sharing her parents’ stories on the CUNY program Building New York
