Sami Steigmann
Holocaust Survivor – Mogilev-Podilskyi
1941-1944
Israel Defense Force
1962-1965
Holocaust Survivor – Mogilev-Podilskyi
1941-1944
Israel Defense Force
1962-1965
“…your eligibility has been established as a victim of medical experiments…” Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation
Sami Steigmann was born on December 21, 1939 in Czernovitz, Romania. Czernovitz was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in an area called Bukovina. It later became part of the U.S.S.R. and is today located in Ukraine. His father Nathan, and mother Reghina, met at the textile factory where they worked in Czernovitz. His father asked his mother for a date, but she said she was seeing someone else. His father replied, “that’s not a problem, you can see him for as long as you like, but you will be mine.” They were together for 65 years and married for 57 years until Sami’s mother passed away.
In 1941 as World War II raged across Europe the Nazi’s began implementing their ‘Final Solution’. Sami, only 18 months old at the time, along with his mother and father, were deported by the Romanian government to a Nazi labor camp known as Mogilev-Podilskyi. It was located in Transnistria, which at that time, was part of the U.S.S.R. but annexed by Romania after the Nazi’s invaded Russia during WWII. Today it is located in Ukraine.
Sami and his parents managed to stay together as a family during their time in the camp. There was little food provided to the prisoners by the Nazi’s. At 18 months old Sami was too small to perform work. Instead, the Nazi’s decided to perform medical experiments on him. Sami and his parents never knew exactly what these experiments were, but Sami has lived his entire live with intense, unending pain in his head, neck, shoulders and back. Sami attributes his survival in the camp to “Luck”. “It all depended on what type of a camp it was, who the camp commandant was, who the guards were.”
“My luck was I was never separated from my parents….my life was saved later on by a German woman…when she noticed the physical signs that I was dying from starvation.” Those signs were a big head, swollen stomach and swollen feet. The Nazi’s operated a farm next to the camp. The German woman would bring food to the SS guards each day and would smuggle in milk for Sami. Eventually color began to return to his cheeks. Who knows why a poor German woman would risk her life and place her family in danger to save a Jewish child. We will never know the answer to that question.
Mogilev-Podilskyi was liberated by Soviets in 1944. Sami and his family survived but 40 of 42 members of his father’s family perished in the concentration camps. One of Sami’s uncles, Max, survived as a refuge in Shanghai, China and eventually immigrated to the United States. For the next two years his family lived somewhere in the Soviet Union. His father had grown up an orphan and he used his survival skills to provide for his family during a time when there was little food to feed the local populace. He eventually got a job as an accountant.
In 1946 the Romanian government allowed a small group of Jews to re-patriate to Romania. Sami’s father was an anti-communist and was born in Romania and he elected to take his family back to Romania. They settled in a small town called Reghin, in the Transylvania section of Romania. Sami likes to say he is the “Jewish Dracula”.
Sami has no memory of his time in Mogilev-Podilskyi. His family never spoke about the time in the camp with him until 1971 when he was 31 years of age. More on that later. It was Sami’s experience that survivors, like his parents did not speak publicly and/or to their children about the Holocaust. “They did not speak to the children. They wanted the children to have a normal life.” Sami believes that changed in 1961 after the trial and conviction of Adolph Eichmann.
Sami grew up in Romania and described post war living conditions there as very difficult. There was no indoor plumbing so there were frequent trips to the well and the outhouse. Sami didn’t feel poor because all of his neighbors were in the same situation. He grew up in a religious household and observed the Sabbath. He recalls his small town consisting of both Jewish and Gentile Romanians. He remembers most people getting along with minimal discrimination. “Most of the people will get along and there are some people that don’t.” After he graduated from high school Sami went on to trade school in Bucharest.
In 1949 his father applied to live in Israel. The family finally received their Visa in 1961 “and the Romanian government had to be bribed to let us go”. The Stegmann family, that now included Sami’s sister Betty, immigrated to Israel. Sami was 21 years old at the time and was starting his life over. The family settled in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. At this time service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was mandatory. As a recent arrival, Sami was given a year to enlist. Sami, however, was anxious to serve his new country and enlisted immediately. Sami served from ’62 to ’65 as a cockpit instrumentation specialist and electrician. After Sami’s tour of duty with the IDF he attended the University in Jerusalem and studied accounting.
In 1968 Sami immigrated to the US with no money and no ability to speak the English language. Why would someone uproot their life and elect to start over? “There are lots of jokes about Jewish mothers. My mother said, ‘you’re 28 years old, you’re not married, why don’t you travel’. She wouldn’t stop, so I went.”
Sami recalled, at that time, immigration to the U.S. was based on what professions were needed by the U.S. Sami was an accountant and apparently the U.S. needed accountants. Sami waited less than one year before he was granted permission to enter the U.S.
Sami briefly visited his uncle in Santa Barbara and then continued on to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sami taught himself to speak English by watching television commercials. In Milwaukee he had a wealthy second cousin who promised his father he would help Sami. “Let’s just say promises made never kept, so I had to struggle to find a job,” It took some time, but Sami was befriended by a business owner because they both spoke Yiddish. “He liked me, so he hired me.”
Every day was an effort for Sami. He suffered in constant pain from the experiments performed on him in Mogilev-Podilskyi. In 1971 Sami’s parents came to visit him in Milwaukee. They all took a short walk and at the end of the walk they saw Sami writhing in pain. Sami told them he suffered from this pain on a daily basis. In complete shock, his parents told him about their time in the camp and the experiments although they still did not know exactly what had been done to him. “They don’t know, I don’t know. It is not important.”
Sami met his future wife while she was visiting from Israel. They married in 1974, and his son was born in 1976. In 1983 Sami went through a contentious and bitter divorce which left him estranged from his son. That same year Sami returned to Israel where he took a job as an accountant.
In 1988 Sami returned to the states “again because of my mother. She realized I was more American than Israeli, and she said if you ever want to go back you have my blessing.” Sami came to New York City and settled in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. He took a job as an accountant and eventually bought an apartment in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. By 1996 Sami found himself homeless.
“I got involved with the wrong people. People that I trusted, and they used me and betrayed me. I gave them cash and did not put anything in writing.” Sami explained that the money that was supposed to be invested in a company and that never happened. “They took advantage of my stupidity.” Sami said these were friends of his that he trusted with his life. While the details of this transaction are not completely clear, Sami did say that they threatened his life and as part of the transaction he also lost his apartment.
Sami entered a homeless shelter and found himself having thoughts of suicide. After six months of living in the shelter Sami began to rebuild his life. His first step was to kick his 2 and a half pack a day smoking habit cold turkey. He did that on December 13,1996. “It was a Friday the 13th in case you are superstitious.” Through Public Assistance Sami found his own apartment in Manhattan and his life began to stabilize. He then threw himself into volunteering. At the highpoint Sami was volunteering as many as 60+ hours per week for 18 volunteer organizations. “Each one gave me something that was missing in my life.” His first volunteer position was as a Big Apple greeter.
When you speak with Sami you would never know he was in pain. “I’m coming from a generation that was very stoic, which means we were not allowed to complain. We were not allowed to cry. We were not allowed to show pain.”
Even the doctors did not believe the pain he described. At one point he was using very strong, addictive pain killers that negatively affected his lifestyle. It took close to a year, but he learned to live with the pain and without pain killers. “I have a very high pain tolerance.”
In February of 2002 Sami submitted a claim to the German government for compensation for his years in the labor camp and his subsequent years of pain. Sami did not have any documentation to support his claims and the only witnesses to corroborate his story were his parents and they had passed away. However, the Nazi’s had meticulously documented every aspect of their efforts to exterminate the Jewish people. Despite no documentation or witnesses to corroborate his story he was awarded $5,348. While not a life changing amount of money, the recognition of what had happened to him gave his life meaning.
In 2003 Sami attended a private function for Holocaust survivors, their children and their liberators at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Sami recalled thousands of people from all over the world attending. Sami sat next to a man born in his city that was also deported to the same labor camp at the same time Sami was there. The other man was 8 months old when he entered the camp. From that day on Sami took an active interest in the Holocaust. “That’s the difference between history and living history. That was the first time that I felt I belonged to the Holocaust Survivors.”
In 2008 Sami was asked to speak to a class of sixth graders. He didn’t think he had a compelling story. “But one sixth grader changed my life forever”. She wrote him a letter saying, ‘your story was overwhelming, and I promise I will pass your story to my children’. Because of that sixth-grade student Sami decided to dedicate his life to reaching as many people as he can to inform them of the Holocaust. Today Sami is a pro bono speaker teaching motivation, tolerance and the history of the Holocaust.
Sami makes many presentations each year to a wide variety of audiences. One slide from his presentation reads as follows: “Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed six million Jews. Education is understanding how millions ordinary Germans and people from other countries were convinced it was required. Education is learning how to spot the signs of history repeating itself.” A timely message today, in September 2024.
Between public housing and social security today Sami lives below the poverty line but is making the best of life. Sami also receives assistance from Selfhelp Community Service in New York City. Selfhelp is an internationally renowned Nazi Victim Service Program and the largest provider of comprehensive service to Holocaust survivors in North America. Sami has a Yiddish saying, and the loose translation is “I am happy with my lot.”
Thank you, Sami for educating young people so one of the darkest periods of recorded history doesn’t fade away.
“Fully aware that no amount of money can compensate you for the severe injustices that you suffered, we do hope that you will regard this payment as a symbolic acknowledgement of those justices.” Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation
Sami Steigmann was born on December 21, 1939 in Czernovitz, Romania. Czernovitz was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in an area called Bukovina. It later became part of the U.S.S.R. and is today located in Ukraine. His father Nathan, and mother Reghina, met at the textile factory where they worked in Czernovitz. His father asked his mother for a date, but she said she was seeing someone else. His father replied, “that’s not a problem, you can see him for as long as you like, but you will be mine.” They were together for 65 years and married for 57 years until Sami’s mother passed away.
In 1941 as World War II raged across Europe the Nazi’s began implementing their ‘Final Solution’. Sami, only 18 months old at the time, along with his mother and father, were deported by the Romanian government to a Nazi labor camp known as Mogilev-Podilskyi. It was located in Transnistria, which at that time, was part of the U.S.S.R. but annexed by Romania after the Nazi’s invaded Russia during WWII. Today it is located in Ukraine.
Sami and his parents managed to stay together as a family during their time in the camp. There was little food provided to the prisoners by the Nazi’s. At 18 months old Sami was too small to perform work. Instead, the Nazi’s decided to perform medical experiments on him. Sami and his parents never knew exactly what these experiments were, but Sami has lived his entire live with intense, unending pain in his head, neck, shoulders and back. Sami attributes his survival in the camp to “Luck”. “It all depended on what type of a camp it was, who the camp commandant was, who the guards were.”
“My luck was I was never separated from my parents….my life was saved later on by a German woman…when she noticed the physical signs that I was dying from starvation.” Those signs were a big head, swollen stomach and swollen feet. The Nazi’s operated a farm next to the camp. The German woman would bring food to the SS guards each day and would smuggle in milk for Sami. Eventually color began to return to his cheeks. Who knows why a poor German woman would risk her life and place her family in danger to save a Jewish child. We will never know the answer to that question.
Mogilev-Podilskyi was liberated by Soviets in 1944. Sami and his family survived but 40 of 42 members of his father’s family perished in the concentration camps. One of Sami’s uncles, Max, survived as a refuge in Shanghai, China and eventually immigrated to the United States. For the next two years his family lived somewhere in the Soviet Union. His father had grown up an orphan and he used his survival skills to provide for his family during a time when there was little food to feed the local populace. He eventually got a job as an accountant.
In 1946 the Romanian government allowed a small group of Jews to re-patriate to Romania. Sami’s father was an anti-communist and was born in Romania and he elected to take his family back to Romania. They settled in a small town called Reghin, in the Transylvania section of Romania. Sami likes to say he is the “Jewish Dracula”.
Sami has no memory of his time in Mogilev-Podilskyi. His family never spoke about the time in the camp with him until 1971 when he was 31 years of age. More on that later. It was Sami’s experience that survivors, like his parents did not speak publicly and/or to their children about the Holocaust. “They did not speak to the children. They wanted the children to have a normal life.” Sami believes that changed in 1961 after the trial and conviction of Adolph Eichmann.
Sami grew up in Romania and described post war living conditions there as very difficult. There was no indoor plumbing so there were frequent trips to the well and the outhouse. Sami didn’t feel poor because all of his neighbors were in the same situation. He grew up in a religious household and observed the Sabbath. He recalls his small town consisting of both Jewish and Gentile Romanians. He remembers most people getting along with minimal discrimination. “Most of the people will get along and there are some people that don’t.” After he graduated from high school Sami went on to trade school in Bucharest.
In 1949 his father applied to live in Israel. The family finally received their Visa in 1961 “and the Romanian government had to be bribed to let us go”. The Stegmann family, that now included Sami’s sister Betty, immigrated to Israel. Sami was 21 years old at the time and was starting his life over. The family settled in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. At this time service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was mandatory. As a recent arrival, Sami was given a year to enlist. Sami, however, was anxious to serve his new country and enlisted immediately. Sami served from ’62 to ’65 as a cockpit instrumentation specialist and electrician. After Sami’s tour of duty with the IDF he attended the University in Jerusalem and studied accounting.
In 1968 Sami immigrated to the US with no money and no ability to speak the English language. Why would someone uproot their life and elect to start over? “There are lots of jokes about Jewish mothers. My mother said, ‘you’re 28 years old, you’re not married, why don’t you travel’. She wouldn’t stop, so I went.”
Sami recalled, at that time, immigration to the U.S. was based on what professions were needed by the U.S. Sami was an accountant and apparently the U.S. needed accountants. Sami waited less than one year before he was granted permission to enter the U.S.
Sami briefly visited his uncle in Santa Barbara and then continued on to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sami taught himself to speak English by watching television commercials. In Milwaukee he had a wealthy second cousin who promised his father he would help Sami. “Let’s just say promises made never kept, so I had to struggle to find a job,” It took some time, but Sami was befriended by a business owner because they both spoke Yiddish. “He liked me, so he hired me.”
Every day was an effort for Sami. He suffered in constant pain from the experiments performed on him in Mogilev-Podilskyi. In 1971 Sami’s parents came to visit him in Milwaukee. They all took a short walk and at the end of the walk they saw Sami writhing in pain. Sami told them he suffered from this pain on a daily basis. In complete shock, his parents told him about their time in the camp and the experiments although they still did not know exactly what had been done to him. “They don’t know, I don’t know. It is not important.”
Sami met his future wife while she was visiting from Israel. They married in 1974, and his son was born in 1976. In 1983 Sami went through a contentious and bitter divorce which left him estranged from his son. That same year Sami returned to Israel where he took a job as an accountant.
In 1988 Sami returned to the states “again because of my mother. She realized I was more American than Israeli, and she said if you ever want to go back you have my blessing.” Sami came to New York City and settled in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. He took a job as an accountant and eventually bought an apartment in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. By 1996 Sami found himself homeless.
“I got involved with the wrong people. People that I trusted, and they used me and betrayed me. I gave them cash and did not put anything in writing.” Sami explained that the money that was supposed to be invested in a company and that never happened. “They took advantage of my stupidity.” Sami said these were friends of his that he trusted with his life. While the details of this transaction are not completely clear, Sami did say that they threatened his life and as part of the transaction he also lost his apartment.
Sami entered a homeless shelter and found himself having thoughts of suicide. After six months of living in the shelter Sami began to rebuild his life. His first step was to kick his 2 and a half pack a day smoking habit cold turkey. He did that on December 13,1996. “It was a Friday the 13th in case you are superstitious.” Through Public Assistance Sami found his own apartment in Manhattan and his life began to stabilize. He then threw himself into volunteering. At the highpoint Sami was volunteering as many as 60+ hours per week for 18 volunteer organizations. “Each one gave me something that was missing in my life.” His first volunteer position was as a Big Apple greeter.
When you speak with Sami you would never know he was in pain. “I’m coming from a generation that was very stoic, which means we were not allowed to complain. We were not allowed to cry. We were not allowed to show pain.”
Even the doctors did not believe the pain he described. At one point he was using very strong, addictive pain killers that negatively affected his lifestyle. It took close to a year, but he learned to live with the pain and without pain killers. “I have a very high pain tolerance.”
In February of 2002 Sami submitted a claim to the German government for compensation for his years in the labor camp and his subsequent years of pain. Sami did not have any documentation to support his claims and the only witnesses to corroborate his story were his parents and they had passed away. However, the Nazi’s had meticulously documented every aspect of their efforts to exterminate the Jewish people. Despite no documentation or witnesses to corroborate his story he was awarded $5,348. While not a life changing amount of money, the recognition of what had happened to him gave his life meaning.
In 2003 Sami attended a private function for Holocaust survivors, their children and their liberators at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Sami recalled thousands of people from all over the world attending. Sami sat next to a man born in his city that was also deported to the same labor camp at the same time Sami was there. The other man was 8 months old when he entered the camp. From that day on Sami took an active interest in the Holocaust. “That’s the difference between history and living history. That was the first time that I felt I belonged to the Holocaust Survivors.”
In 2008 Sami was asked to speak to a class of sixth graders. He didn’t think he had a compelling story. “But one sixth grader changed my life forever”. She wrote him a letter saying, ‘your story was overwhelming, and I promise I will pass your story to my children’. Because of that sixth-grade student Sami decided to dedicate his life to reaching as many people as he can to inform them of the Holocaust. Today Sami is a pro bono speaker teaching motivation, tolerance and the history of the Holocaust.
Sami makes many presentations each year to a wide variety of audiences. One slide from his presentation reads as follows: “Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed six million Jews. Education is understanding how millions ordinary Germans and people from other countries were convinced it was required. Education is learning how to spot the signs of history repeating itself.” A timely message today, in September 2024.
Between public housing and social security today Sami lives below the poverty line but is making the best of life. Sami also receives assistance from Selfhelp Community Service in New York City. Selfhelp is an internationally renowned Nazi Victim Service Program and the largest provider of comprehensive service to Holocaust survivors in North America. Sami has a Yiddish saying, and the loose translation is “I am happy with my lot.”
Thank you, Sami for educating young people so one of the darkest periods of recorded history doesn’t fade away.
“Fully aware that no amount of money can compensate you for the severe injustices that you suffered, we do hope that you will regard this payment as a symbolic acknowledgement of those justices.” Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation