Jack Feldman, a prominent Holocaust survivor from Rochester, New York, passed away on 25 December 2021, at the age of 95.
Feldman’s story is the subject of the HBO documentary, The Number on Great Grandpa's Arm, in which Feldman and his ten-year-old grandson discuss his experience during the Holocaust. The film won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation and was the center of an installation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.
Born in 1926 in Skarzysko-Kamiena, Poland, Srulek “Jack” Feldman and his family were forced to move to the Sosnoweic Ghetto when the war broke out in 1939. At the age of fourteen, Feldman was deported to Bergen-Belsen, and later to Buchenwald, Annaberg, Fallsbruck, Gleiwice, Ludwigsdorf, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Feldman survived the death march from Poland to Germany before being liberated on 5 May 1945. He then went back home to Poland, where he learned that none of his immediate family members had survived the war.
Feldman married his wife, Sally, at the Feldafing Displaced Persons camp. Their first son, Sam, was born there as well. After arriving in the United States in 1949, the couple had two more children, Irving and Rochelle.
When he and his family moved to Rochester, Feldman opened a fish market. According to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Feldman “never forgot what it meant to be hungry and would give free fish to customers too poor to pay.”
Feldman is survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
