#223 Unstoppable: Siggi Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend

**David Senra** (0:00)
When people ask me, how did you survive? I leave out a small thing, which isn't really a small thing. Any survivor who has a heart and brains lives with guilt that they survived and others didn't.
My mother was sent straight to the gas chamber. My father was beaten to death.
My sister Martha was murdered. My brothers Willie and Martin and Louis were murdered. And here I am, and they're all dead.
Why them and not me?
It was as if God had his hand on my shoulder to lead and guide me when I was all alone and in mortal danger.
I remember everything since I was three and a half years old. I can tell you the color of the stripes on my mother's sweater from when I was a little boy. It's good and bad, such a memory, because everything stays with you and you can't shut it off. I remember where we went fishing as boys, but I also remember what the barracks look like in Auschwitz and the capo with the stick in his hand and everything he did. And that memory is very, very bad. It never goes away.
He reached down and rolled up the leg of his pants. Look, see? Since the day of my liberation, I wear two pairs of socks. For the past 50 years, I've never left the house without two pairs of socks, that and a safety pin.
Two pairs of socks because in the camps, a pair of socks could make the difference between living and dying. The deficiency of the body, the dirt, the filth. From a splinter, you would develop rotting flesh.
One splinter from a wooden shoe and you would die.
And why a safety pin? A little pin could save your life in the camps if you need to hold up a piece of cloth as a bandage around your leg or keep your pants up.
How did I remain alive for almost two years in Auschwitz? It wasn't by education. I didn't have any. It was the hand of the Almighty. I'm going to tell you something that I don't think I've ever said. As terrible as it sounds, I don't think I could live without the nightmares. It gives me a very ultra realistic difference between life and death. It shows me what life is now. And I would never give that up. Never, never, never.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Unstoppable, Siggi Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz survivor and penniless immigrant to Wall Street legend. And it was written by Joshua M. Greene. This story is unbelievable. We too learn what Siggi had to go through and endure and then what he was able to accomplish after the fact. I'm going to jump right into the book. The book starts when he's 21 years old. The year is 1947 He's arriving for the first time in America, and he's about to be reunited with one of his sisters. And so they're pulling into a port in New York City. It says, 21 year old Siggi had been nauseous vomiting and losing weight for most of the two week ocean journey. Hearing the cheers, he climbed weakly to the top deck and took a deep breath. The fresh air was a relief after the bad smells of so many people cramped together on the deck below. Nearly all Jews deported to Auschwitz died within four months of arrival. But here he was, alive and in America after having spent nearly two years in that concentration camp.
So he's about to meet his sister Jenny, who escaped about a decade before the time that Siggi arrives in America. And so I want to tell you a little bit about how why Siggi was actually helped save her life as just a young kid. So the family was being persecuted in this small town in Germany. They have to flee that town. They wound up in Berlin in 1936 You could not have had worse timing. And so as a little boy, he's realizing, hey, there's a lot of people fleeing. And he says by listening in on the conversations and cafes, he learned that some people were managing to escape Europe by securing exit visas. Siggi visited a dozen consulates looking for back entrances and open windows in his mission to steal the necessary documents. And so this is taking place 11 years before he's gonna meet this sister that he's about to steal these documents so she can escape in New York. So it says, Siggi risked his life scaling embassy walls, breaking into offices and gathering up rubber stamps. With the stolen tools, he forged three visas. And so at first he offers these visas to his parents, two of these visas to his parents. His mother says, no, I'm not going anywhere. I was born here and I will die here. She didn't know how prophetic that statement was because in, let's see, seven years from now, they're going to be sent to Auschwitz. She's killed immediately. And then a few weeks later, his father is beaten to death. And so he dies in Auschwitz as well. So it says, she declined. I was born here and I will die here. So Siggi gave her visa to his older brother, Joe, who had already been a prisoner in a concentration camp. So this is well before they get sent to Auschwitz, but managed to get released. Siggi figured Joe was already a marked man and needed to get out of Germany quickly. His sister Jenny was pregnant and Siggi insisted that she and her husband accept the two remaining visas. So those are the three visas they were able to escape. It says Jenny and Joe left Germany. They first traveled to, they left Germany, were able to emigrate to Shanghai and China. Then from Shanghai, they made their way to the Dominican Republic and then from the Dominican Republic, they were able to get into America. And so it was very common during this time. They hadn't had any way of speaking. Siggi had no idea like what was going on in Jenny's life. They wound up meeting on the docks in New York City. So the book starts with him as a 21 year old landing in America, flat broke. He's got like 200 bucks in his pocket. And then from there, he builds this what's gonna wind up being a multiple hundred million dollar business empire. But that's the first chapter. That's where the first chapter ends and then it goes back in time and it talks about his time in Auschwitz and everything he has to go through to get back to this point.