“My parents didn’t know when they forced me to take piano and tap dancing lessons that it would save my life,” said Holocaust survivor Bob Fischer, who was only 6 when he was imprisoned in the Nazi’s Theresienstadt Ghetto camp.
Fischer shared his story at the Jacksonville Women Lawyers Association’s luncheon last week. The event was co-sponsored by The Jacksonville Bar Association.
His ability to dance and play music earned him a job with a children’s troupe, entertaining soldiers and representatives of the International Red Cross.
Now 80, Fischer is the youngest living Holocaust survivor in the area.
When he was a small child, his Jewish family was forced to flee their home in former Czechoslovakia.
Within a year, Fischer, his mother and his 3-year-old sister returned to their native country, walking at night and resting in safe houses during the day.
In advance of the journey, his father, against his mother’s wishes, went to have their shoes repaired, but never returned.
As Nazi control increased, his mother hid his sister in a convent to be raised Catholic and sent Fischer to live with his grandparents.
Fischer, his grandparents and an uncle were among 144,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt.
He said he endured inexplicable atrocities and saw firsthand “man’s inhumanity to man.”
When his clothes were threadbare, he said he scavenged uniforms from the freshly dead. He subsisted on no more than bits of bread and potato. He watched a Nazi prison guard shoot dead his elderly grandfather and two other men for not sweeping fast enough.
At the time of the camp’s liberation in May 1945, Fischer was one of only 17,000 remaining Jews and one of less than 1,800 surviving children. He was 10.
When Fischer reunited with his mother they had nothing but a few family photos she had buried before the invasion.
When he and his mother returned to the convent for his then 7-year-old sister, she no longer recognized them. Fischer’s family immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island when he was 13.
For the first time, he attended school and went on to college.
Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is Wednesday.