Death camp survivor taught his son not to hate

Bordentown City man discusses his late father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

By: Scott Morgan
   BORDENTOWN CITY — High on the rear wall of the front room of Michael Bergman’s Farnsworth Avenue photography studio hang a quartet of large-scale portraits. Two of them show individuals; the other two, large families gathered in living rooms.
   It’s the latter two that Mr. Bergman treasures most. His own family portraits can’t compete with these — dozens of cheery faces, compared to pictures of his own family, which essentially comes down to his parents.
   "I cherish taking portraits of large families," he says. "It’s an heirloom. I don’t have that."
   Mr. Bergman has no pictures of his father with family because, quite simply, his family no longer exists. Somewhere around 270 of them never survived the Nazis.
   In 1945, Samuel Bergman was a 70-pound survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau; a 20-year-old ex-prisoner who had spent the five previous years so hungry that he sometimes ate dirt to quell the pangs. A generation later and 60 years removed, the process of discussing his father’s ordeal still makes Michael Bergman uneasy.
   "I think he wanted to forget the Holocaust," Mr. Bergman says. "I just avoid it."
   He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he does because he hopes it will do some good. At the very least, he says, it will keep people from forgetting that the Holocaust actually happened.
   If you listen closely enough to Mr. Bergman talk, a portrait starts taking shape. Maybe not a complete image, but a sketch, at least, that recounts the ways Mr. Bergman saw his father — as a tough, hard-working saloon owner who ran his business in an insanely rough neighborhood in Newark; and as a lightning-fast eater, heavy smoker and avid card player who spent his social life commingling with other Holocaust survivors and very few others. He questioned God, Mr. Bergman says, because of what happened to his family and friends.
   For a second, when listening to Mr. Bergman talk, you almost want to draw the wrong conclusion about his father. You expect to think that Samuel Bergman was a bitter, taciturn and lonely man. And even Michael agrees you might be forgiven for thinking that. But you’d be wrong.
   "He liked people," Mr. Bergman says. "He didn’t have any hate for the Germans. Once when I was a kid, I said something about the Germans and he slapped me. He said, ‘You can’t blame a whole group of people for what a handful of people have done.’
   "If you start to hate people in your heart … it poisons you," he says. "And my father was never poisoned. I take that with me every day."
   Mr. Bergman considers his moral compass, along with his work ethic, a direct inheritance.
   "I feel I’m a reflection of my father’s heart," he says. "He was a good-hearted man. Very accepting."
   These days, though his father died almost 10 years ago, Mr. Bergman still lives by the mantra his father held close to his heart — that people are worth being kind to. He uses this, he says, to guide his own family, which is about to see the bar mitzvah of one of his two sons. And if it is not so much a faith in God that keeps Mr. Bergman connected to his father, it is the weight of the past and the meaning of simply being Jewish.
   "I want to keep the kids Jewish," Mr. Bergman says. "I can’t forget who I am "because (my family was) killed for it. I don’t want to be the one who breaks that link."