by Michael Berenbaum

Sig Halbreich died just 60 days short of his 99th birthday. His death caused me to remember a breakfast we had some five years ago. Sig, who had just returned from another speaking engagement and was describing his activities. At 93+, Sig was a survivor of several camps—Sachsuenhausen, Gross Rosen, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz III [Buna-Monowitz], Dora-Mittelbau and Nordhausen. First arrested as a Polish army officer in 1939, he spent more than five years in German incarceration including three winters at Auschwitz.

He was born in Dziedzice in what is today southern Poland and worked as a pharmaceutical apprentice. He served in the Polish Army, graduated with a degree from the University of Cracow in 1935 and worked in Katowice as a practicing pharmacist until the outbreak of WWII.

He has what Primo Levi had described as a “low number” at Auschwitz, worthy of respect for the mere fact that he endured. He was a veteran prisoner and that rare capo [concentration camp foreman] who protected his prisoners, most especially the children whom he brought into his barracks and to whom he gave lighter assignments. He treated them with as much decency as conditions permitted.

Because he spoke English and five other languages, Halbreich worked as an interpreter and investigator with the American War Crimes Branch in preparation for the Nuremberg trials. He later became a member of the Board of Buna-Auschwitz Committee and was called many times to testify as a witness in the trials of Nazi criminals. His testimony was used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960.

Sig came to the United States in 1946 and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved to Los Angeles in 1959. In addition to his speaking engagements, he served as president of The 1939 Club in Los Angeles and led the effort to establish an endowed chair in Holocaust studies at UCLA.

By all accounts, even at 93 and visibly slowed, he was a man to be reckoned with and worth spending time with. Conversations with Sig were intense. I listened to try to gain a glimpse of the inner chambers of the concentration camps where he spent his thirties.

Sig once handed me a list of the more than 2000 speaking engagements that he made regarding the Holocaust; I was astounded by both the volume of his speaking engagements and by their diversity. He has spoken in schools of all kinds from universities and colleges to high schools – public and private, Catholic, Jewish evangelical and elite prep-schools as well as junior high schools and even elementary and Hebrew schools.

If invited, he attended. No longer able to drive, he traversed the seemingly non-existent Los Angeles public transportation system when no one could drive him around. As a concession to age, years ago he took another Los Angeles survivor Fred Diament, who as he approached four score years was more than 15 years Sig’s junior, and was with him in case the day came when Sig was no longer able to visit schools. He wanted to train a successor so that the program could continue. But Freddy died four years before Sig, a blow that was difficult for him, who endured so much, to accept.

Sig wrote a book, Before, During and After, in 1991 and was the subject of a children’s book, The Tattoo on My Grandfather’s Arm, which explains the Holocaust to young children; those young enough to sit in their parent’s or grandparent’s lap and be read to prior to bedtime. He was also instrumental and deeply involved in creating the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, which was previously know as the Martrys’ Memorial Museum, and should not be confused with the more prominent and well-known Beit Hashoah/Museum of Tolerance established nearby more than a decade ago by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Listening to Sig, I reflected that if you asked most survivors why they survived, the most frequent answer was luck; in truth, they survived because of a number of factors—including age and physical condition, their ability to perceive and respond to danger and the resources that they had, inner recourses as well as material resources. Many also required assistance from family and friends, acquaintances and even strangers.

“No one survived without help,” Sig wrote. “No one!” So luck is a partial answer which indicates that every survivor knows someone wiser and stronger, more deserving, resourceful and capable who was at the wrong place at the wrong time and met their death. The accidental nature of their survival conferred no meaning and offered no lessons. Some—maybe even many—felt guilty for the very fact of their survival. I have often heard it asked by survivors: “Why did I survive, when so many others did not?”

That question could neither be answered immediately after the war nor easily in the years thereafter. But for some survivors the most compelling answer is found not in answering why they survived, but in what they have done with the accident of their survival. They have borne witness and thus, ex post facto, endowed their survival with meaning. They have used it to speak to conscience, to enhance human dignity and to plead for human decency. It is an important part of their moral legacy, an attempt, however inadequate it may be, to rescue something from the ashes and overcome some of the evil that shaped their youth and thus their life. This generation will be the last privileged to be the direct beneficiary of that decision to embrace the world and to compensate for loss by testimony.

He is survived by his wife Ruth of 62 years, who is also a Holocaust survivor, his daughter Emily Tigerman of Sherman Oaks, California, son Jeremy and daughter-in-law Nancy Halbreich of Dallas, Texas, granddaughter Bobbye Tigerman of Santa Monica, California and grandson Reg Tigerman of Los Angeles.