Holocaust survivor Abraham Peck saw it as his duty to share his story. Of cheating death in nine Nazi concentration and work camps. Of being so famished that even a bread scrap provided sustenance. 
  
 file/VIOREL FLORESCU/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Abraham Peck in a November 2012 photo. 
  
 The longtime Fair Lawn resident, who died of kidney failure last Thursday at 91, often addressed school and community groups in North Jersey and was the subject of a recently published biography. He wanted people to remember the Holocaust and “not to stand for any injustice in the world,” his son, Jacob, said. “That was a core piece of his legacy.” 
  
 The only one in his immediate family to emerge from the Holocaust, Mr. Peck also was the last remaining survivor from the Polish town of Szadek. From age 15 to 20, he endured starvation, disease and forced labor at concentration camps including Auschwitz, where the identification number 143450 was tattooed on his left forearm. 
  
 His worst day, he recalled in an interview several months ago, was seeing his father die. Mr. Peck begged to help with the burial but the SS guard smacked him with the barrel of a gun and ordered him back to work. 
  
 “Until this day, I don’t know where my father is buried,” he said. 
  
 Abraham Peck, then Abraham Pik, was liberated by U.S. forces on April 30, 1945, and sent to a centralized location in Germany so he could find other survivors from his area of Poland. There he learned that only seven cousins from his extended family survived. 
  
 He married another survivor and, with their infant son, immigrated in 1949 to the United States. The family settled in Paterson and received support from the local Jewish community. 
  
 Mr. Peck took a job at an upholstery manufacturing company and eventually bought the business. He renamed it Jalen Corp. and ran it successfully for 25 years. 
  
 Jacob Peck credited his father’s survival to mazel —Hebrew for “luck” — and a rock-solid will. “He saw he was in a battle with Hitler and the only way to win that battle was surviving,” the son said. “He felt if he survived, he could tell people about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated.” 
  
 That’s exactly what Mr. Peck did. At an event at a synagogue in 2012, he shared the stage with an Army veteran, Harry Feinberg of Elmwood Park, who helped liberate two German death camps. 
  
 Mr. Peck’s story received a wider audience this year with the publication of his biography. Titled “Abe-vs-Adolf” and subtitled “The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Abe Peck,” it was written by North Jersey author Maya Ross and is available as a book, ebook and video book. 
  
 Ross met Mr. Peck while she was volunteering at Cafe Europa, a social event for the survivor community run by Jewish Family Service. “He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo from Auschwitz,” Ross said. “After meeting him a couple of times, I realized his life was a book all by itself.” 
  
 “Abe-vs-Adolf” was based on extensive interviews over four years with Mr. Peck. 
  
 “Abe’s mission was to prevent this from ever happening again by teaching as many people as possible,” Ross said, referring to the Holocaust. 
  
 In Mr. Peck’s view, his long life was tantamount to victory over Adolf Hitler. 
  
 “Living was winning,” Ross said. 
  
 The seeds of his mission were planted not long after Mr. Peck arrived in the U.S. In “Abe-vs-Adolf” Ross wrote that Mr. Peck was frustrated “that the American citizens he met did not have an inkling of the horrors which Holocaust survivors had experienced at the hands of the Nazis. Even worse, the Americans he encountered were not at all interested in learning about the tragic plight of European Jews.” 
  
 “In the beginning, we didn’t talk about it. We all were like little kids,” Ross quoted Mr. Peck as saying. “We didn’t talk to American adults about it because they didn’t understand. The American Jews didn’t believe us ... the stories about SS men, the way they pushed us into the ghettos, the way they killed us, the way they treated us. They didn’t want to hear a word about it. It was too terrible for them to believe so we shut up. I shut up for years.” 
  
 Simon Glustrom, rabbi emeritus of the Fair Lawn Jewish Center, where Mr. Peck was a pillar of the congregation, said Mr. Peck was a sociable and forward-looking man who “did not expect the world to look with great pity on him.” 
  
 “In fact, Abe reinvented himself,” the rabbi said, noting the lesson to be learned from Mr. Peck’s nearly 92 years: “That a person should never give up, that there is always hope for the future.” 
  
 Eulogizing Mr. Peck on Monday at Louis Suburban Chapel in Fair Lawn, Glustrom, himself 92 years old, juxtaposed his boyhood in Atlanta during the Great Depression with that of Mr. Peck. 
  
 “My life was like a Garden of Eden compared to Abe’s,” Glustrom said. 
  
 Abraham Peck, whose wife, Helen, died in 2005, is survived by his son, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 
  
 Email: levin@northjersey.com |||||  
  
 Abraham Peck (Frame grab from YouTube) 
  
 143450. 
  
 Abraham Peck had that number etched into his left forearm. From the age of 15 to 20, he heard his captors use it, and only it, to refer to him. 
  
 Peck spent almost all of World War II being shuttled around in cattle cars from one concentration camp to another, where he was forced into slave labor, suffered starvation, torture, loneliness and profound loss. 
  
 He watched his father die in the hands of the Nazis. He lost almost every friend and family member, while he clung to life, finding strength in the belief that if he perished, Hitler would win. 
  
 “He saw he was in a battle with Hitler and the only way to win that battle was surviving,” his son Jacob told the Record of North Jersey. “He felt if he survived, he could tell people about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated.” 
  
 In all, he was held in nine different concentration camps. 
  
 But, as his biographer Maya Ross told the Record of North Jersey, for him “living was winning.” 
  
 And he did. He lived to marry, have a son, two grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and own his own business here in America. 
  
 Last Thursday, at 91 years old, he passed away from kidney failure, the Record of North Jersey reported. 
  
 [After 70 years of waiting, WWII B-17 gunner, 94, revisits Britain. And dies quietly there.] 
  
 Before he died, though, he shared his story to educate anyone who would listen. 
  
 “Abe’s mission was to prevent this from ever happening again by teaching as many people as possible,” Ross told the newspaper. 
  
 Young Abraham Peck (Screengrab from YouTube) 
  
 Peck grew up in Szadek, Poland, a small town of 3,500. Of this, 500 were Jewish. 
  
 After the Nazis swept through Poland and much of Europe, only 13 of those 500 were alive. 
  
 Peck was one of them. 
  
 According to his biography, “Abe-vs-Adolf,” his family included 90 people — four grandparents, two parents, a sister, 14 aunts, 14 uncles and 54 cousins — of whom only seven survived the war. 
  
 Peck was one of them. 
  
 The others were six cousins. 
  
 He recalled his childhood in the 1930s fondly, something out of a storybook, hanging around with a friend named Monick. Together they built a kayak for the summers, using thin plywood, nails and tar. In the winter, they built sleds. 
  
 A local farmer milked a cow directly into a pail for his family. His father tended to a vegetable garden in their yard, which he used to feed the family and stock a popular restaurant he owned in town. 
  
 The atrocities that awaited him remained unimaginable. 
  
 In 1938, he had his bar mitzvah. He remembered eating ptcha, calves feet cooked to the “consistency of gelatin,” he explained — and herring. He also remembered the growing fear for European Jews, as Hitler amassed power. 
  
 “We heard Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he told Ross. “It was a sad time. The Jewish people were depressed and worried at the time I became a bar mitzvah.” 
  
 In late May two years later, after the Germans invaded Poland, they set up a ghetto in Szadek. 
  
 “At first the Szadek ghetto was open, but to make sure none of the Jewish people could freely come and go, the Germans soon enclosed it with a wooden and barbed-wire fence,” Ross said. “It was sealed in the summer of 1940. German police were ordered to shoot without warning any Jew who might approach the barbed-wire fence.” 
  
 During the next five years, he would be held in camps like Auschwitz, Jaworzno and Blechhammer, nine in all. 
  
 The worst moment for him came in 1942. 
  
 His father Jacob had served in the Polish army in World War I, until a bullet sliced clean through his arm. Now, years later with the world at war again, he found himself a slave at the Nazi’s Rawicz Working Camp. In the spring of 1942 he, like many others, contracted pneumonia and died. 
  
 “The conditions in the working camps were terrible,” Peck said. “Men were dying from hunger and disease. One of the men was my father.” 
  
 Peck was 16 years old, stricken with typhoid, his body burning with a 105 degree fever. But he wanted more than anything to see his father into his grave, to treat as a funeral the dumping of his body in a mass grave. 
  
 Each morning, a buggy came to pick up the bodies from the camp and bury them somewhere, though the prisoners didn’t know where. Peck asked to join the trip the morning after his father’s death. 
  
 In response, a guard slammed a rifle into the small of the sick teenager’s back, screaming as an answer, “You goddamn dog. You go back to work.” 
  
 Abraham Peck’s arm (Screengrab from YouTube) 
  
 “But there was no work,” Peck told his biographer years later. “We were just cleaning up the dead.” 
  
 He still doesn’t know where his father’s body is buried. 
  
 In April of 1945, American forces liberated Peck along with other survivors at Dachau, and he learned most of his family had perished. 
  
 He spent time in mourning and anger, but one year later he met Helen Fajwelman, another survivor of the concentration camps. 
  
 “I settled down a lot when I met Helen,” Peck said in his biography. “If I wanted to live, I couldn’t stay the way I was. I had to go with my life.” 
  
 In 1949, he and Helen had a son named Jacob. Later that year, the two immigrated to America, settling in Paterson, N.J. Peck found work an upholstery manufacturing company, which he eventually purchased, renamed Jalen Corp. and ran for 25 years. 
  
 In other words, they lived. 
  
 But he also took every opportunity to share his story. By telling it, he hoped people would not “stand for any injustice in the world,” his son Jacob told the Record of North Jersey. “That was a core piece of his legacy.” 
  
 When he was 88, for example, he visited Saddle Brook High School to share his story with its students. 
  
 “I feel very strong that the young generation should know that there was an evil that killed 6 million people and that it can happen again,” Peck told Patch.com. 
  
 He didn’t hold any details back. 
  
 “Every day living in a camp, every hour was like an eternity,” Peck told the children, according to the website. “If the guard man didn’t like the way you looked at him, he would tell you, ‘Get me the [gun],’ and he would shoot you. We were not human.” 
  
 [Remains of WWII soldier lost in New Guinea mud are now found and home, fulfilling his mother’s dying wish] 
  
 Simon Glustrom, the rabbi at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center of which Peck was an integral member, said Peck “did not expect the world to look with great pity on him.” 
  
 “My life was like a Garden of Eden compared to Abe’s,” Glustrom told the Record of North Jersey. 
  
 But he said Peck taught him one important lesson, “That a person should never give up, that there is always hope for the future.” 
  
 Peck would likely agree. 
  
 “What I learned from my terrible ordeal is not ever to give up hope,” Peck wrote in a statement that one teacher later read to the students at Saddle Brook High School. “It is up to all of us to speak up when we encounter injustice. Do not allow yourself to become a victim or a bystander. We must love and respect our fellow human beings regardless of differences in religion, nationality or color. With hope, let each of us take responsibility to build a better world. One life at a time. One day at a time.” |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?
– During his imprisonment at nine separate concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Abraham Peck expected death to come at any moment. Instead, he lived a full life that came to an end last Thursday at age 91 due to kidney failure, reports the New Jersey Record. The last Jewish survivor from the Polish town of Szadek, Peck was liberated in 1945 before marrying another Holocaust survivor and moving to New Jersey, where he eventually bought an upholstery business. But he was frustrated "that the American citizens he met did not have an inkling of the horrors which Holocaust survivors had experienced at the hands of the Nazis," author Maya Ross wrote in the recent biography Abe-vs-Adolf. "The American Jews didn’t believe us ... the way they killed us, the way they treated us. They didn’t want to hear a word about it. It was too terrible for them to believe so we shut up. I shut up for years.” That eventually ended, and to raise awareness, Peck began speaking at schools and community functions. He was later invited to talk at colleges across the US and Europe, according to his obituary. "He felt if he survived, he could tell people about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated," his son says. He wanted people "not to stand for any injustice in the world. That was a core piece of his legacy." And though Peck lost 83 of 89 family members in the Holocaust, per the Washington Post—he said the day he watched his father die of pneumonia was the worst of his life—he managed to live a happy life. "I made many good friends and they tell me that I am a nice guy!" he said. (This Holocaust survivor just had a dream come true.)