Helen and Joseph (Joe) Fishel

Date: 1910s
Format: photograph

Henia (Helen) (née Katz) Fishel was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Rawa Ruska, a town then in Poland. Following the outbreak of the war in 1939, Helen’s father sent her to Germany where she claimed a hidden identity as a Polish Catholic girl. She found work at a restaurant. A young woman named Helen Neuberg worked in the restaurant across the street. They became friends and visited the park on their day off. After many months, Helen Neuberg took a chance and started humming the Jewish tune, “Hatikvah.” There was much excitement and anxiety between the two young women as they discovered their shared and dangerous commonality. They survived the war and remained best friends for the rest of their lives. Of her family, including four siblings and her parents, Helen was the only survivor.

Joseph (Joe) Fishel was the fourth of five siblings born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Będzin, Poland. Sadly, Joe’s father died when he was 10 years old. Leaving school shortly after, he set out to work to help provide wages for his family. About a year after the 1939 German occupation of Poland, Joe was sent to a labor camp. In unusual circumstances, he visited home on “furlough” from time to time through 1943. During those years, Jews in Będzin were forced into a ghetto. Between 1939 and 1945, when Joe was 18 to 23 years old, he survived numerous concentration and labor camps including Bautrup-Saybusch, Gradditz, Annaberg, Auschwitz, and Dachau, as well as a death March.

Only Joe and his younger brother, Dave, survived the Holocaust. Joe and Helen met and married in Stuttgart after the war. They arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in 1947 due to relatives seeing their wedding photos from Germany. In July 1957, Joe bought Herman Nut Company from his uncle Herman Mirowitz, where both he and Helen worked and ran the business. They raised three children and had many grandchildren. Hear Joe’s testimony in his own words.