[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 46 (Thursday, April 23, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E648-E649]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO SIGI ZIERING
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HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, April 23, 1998
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, today representatives of the Congress, the
Administration, and the Supreme Court gathered in the Great Rotunda of
this historic building for the National Civic Commemoration to remember
the victims of the Holocaust. This annual national memorial service
pays tribute to the six million Jews who died through senseless and
systematic Nazi terror and brutality. At this somber commemoration, we
also honored those heroic American and other Allied forces who
liberated the Nazi concentration camps over half a century ago.
Mr. Speaker, this past week Fortune Magazine (April 13, 1998) devoted
several pages to an article entitled ``Everything in History was
Against Them,'' which profiles five survivors of Nazi savagery who came
to the United States penniless and built fortunes here in their adopted
homeland. It is significant, Mr. Speaker, that four of these five are
residents of my home state of California. Mr. Sigi Ziering of Los
Angeles was one of the five that Fortune Magazine selected to highlight
in this extraordinary article, and I want to pay tribute to him today.
Sigi Ziering, like the other four singled out by Fortune Magazine,
has a unique story, but there are common threads to these five tales of
personal success. The story of the penniless immigrant who succeeds in
America is a familiar theme in our nation's lore, but these stories
involve a degree of courage and determination unmatched in the most
inspiring of Horatio Alger's stories.
These men were, in the words of author Carol J. Loomis, ``Holocaust
survivors in the most rigorous sense,'' they ``actually experienced the
most awful horrors of the Holocaust, enduring a Nazi death camp or a
concentration camp or one of the ghettos that were essentially holding
pens for those camps.''
They picked themselves up ``from the very cruelest of circumstances,
they traveled to America and prospered as businessmen. They did it, to
borrow a phrase from Elie Wiesel, when everything in history was
against them.'' They were teenagers or younger when World War II began.
They lost six years of their youth and six years of education. ``They
were deprived of liberty and shorn of dignity. All lost relatives, and
most lost one or both parents. Each . . . was forced to live constantly
with the threat of death and the knowledge that next time he might be
`thumbed' not into a line of prisoners allowed to live, but into
another line headed for the gas chambers.'' Through luck and the sheer
will to survive, these were some of the very fortunate who lived to
tell the story of that horror.
The second part of their stories is also similar--a variant of the
American dream. These courageous men came to the United States with
``little English and less money.'' Despite their lack of friends and
mentors, they found the drive to succeed. As Loomis notes, ``many
millions who were unencumbered by the heavy, exhausting baggage of the
Holocaust had the same opportunities and never reached out to seize
them as these men did.'' Their success in view of the immense obstacles
that impeded their path makes their stories all the more remarkable.
One other element that is also common to these five outstanding
business leaders--they are ``Founders'' of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum here in Washington, D.C. They have shown a strong commitment to
remembering the brutal horrors of the Holocaust, paying honor to its
victims, and working to prevent the repetition of this vicious
inhumanity.
Mr. Speaker, Sigi Ziering is one of the five Holocaust survivors and
leading American entrepreneurs highlighted in this article. Sigi is the
Chairman of Diagnostic Products Corporation in Los Angeles. As we here
in the Congress mark the annual Days of Remembrance in honor of the
victims of Nazi terror, I am inserting the profile of Sigi Ziering from
Fortune Magazine to be placed in the Record.
Sigi Ziering, Los Angeles, Chairman, Diagnostic Products Corp.
Holocaust survivors, the saying goes, are conditioned not
to cry. But on May 8, 1997, when the founders of the
Holocaust Memorial Museum met for a reunion--and when the
flags of 32 U.S. Army divisions that had liberated the
concentration camps were paraded into the rotunda of the U.S.
Capitol--Sigi Ziering, today a serious, reflective man of 70,
wept. He spoke of this moment in a speech: ``Today I cried
because the worst memory of the ghetto and the camps was the
feeling of total isolation and total abandonment by the rest
of the world. This feeling of utter despair and hopelessness
weighed more heavily on us than the constant hunger, the
beatings, and the imminent death facing us every minute.''
His tears, he said, were for the millions who never got to
see the flags.
His own ordeal began in Kassel, Germany, where his father,
a Polish citizen, was a clothing merchant. In 1939 the father
fled to England, expecting his wife and two children--Sigi
(then officially Siegfried), 11, and Herman, 12--to follow as
soon as they, too, could get visas. Instead, they became
trapped in Germany.
The three scraped by until late 1941, when the Germans
summarily transported 1,000 Jews, the Zierings included, to
Rigi, Latvia. Some of the adult men in the group were sent
directly to a nearby death camp, and the rest of the Jews
were installed in a ghetto bloodstained from murders just
carried out. Of the entire 1,000, Sigi Ziering believes that
only 16 survived the war, among them, besides himself, his
mother and brother.
In Riga the boys actually went to school for a while. But
their mother, wanting the Germans to think them useful,
required them to drop out and work. Once Sigi had a plum job
in a ``fish hall,'' from which he was able to smuggle food
back to the ghetto. As he sneaked in with the food, he would
sometimes pass dead Jews who had been caught doing the same
and been hanged in the streets as an example.
[[Page E649]]
Toward war's end, with the Russians closing in on Riga, the
Germans began to move their Jewish captives around. Ziering
believes that the SS in fact connived to keep small groups of
Jews alive, so that the need to guard them would keep the
Germans from being sent to the front.
The Zierings were moved to a German prison, Fuhlsbuttel, on
the outskirts of Hamburg. Prison living conditions were a
distinct step up. But every week the Germans would load eight
or ten Jews into a truck and transport them to Bergen-Belsen
for elimination. ``With German precision,'' says Ziering, the
guards went at their job alphabetically--and never got to
``Z.''
British troops then closed off Bergen-Belsen, and the
Germans marched their remaining Jews to a Kiel concentration
camp, whose commandant's first words upon seeing them were:
``I can't believe that Jews still exist.'' The camps grisly
conditions killed 40 to 50 inmates daily. Another 35 males
were murdered when they could not run a kilometer while
carrying a heavy piece of wood. Sigi and his brother
passed that test.
Then, as the Zierings heard the story, Count Folke
Bernadotte of Sweden offered to pay Heinrich Himmler $5
million for 1,000 Jews. (Whether the Count indeed made this
offer or paid the money is not clear.) A German officer told
the Ziering boys, who believed it not at all, that they were
to be included but were unpresentable in the striped clothing
they wore. Sigi and his brother were taken to a mortuary,
where they were directed to strip the clothes from the
corpses that lay there and make them their own. And on May 1,
1945, Red Cross workers arrived to take the 1,000 to Sweden.
The route lay through Copenhagen, and at its railroad
station, the Jews heard excited shouts: ``Hitler is dead.''
As if he'd suddenly awakened from a nightmare of
unimaginable horror, Sigi then entered into a world of near-
normalcy for a 17-year-old. His family managed to reunite in
London, where the father--``a fantastic businessman,'' says
Sigi--was doing well as a diamond merchant. Sigi, a bare five
years of elementary education behind him, entered a tutorial
school and then the University of London. He wished to be a
doctor but found that almost all medical school spots were
reserved for war veterans--the kind who'd worn military
insignia, not tattooted numbers.
Hunting opportunity, the Ziering family made it to the U.S.
in 1949, settling in Brooklyn. Working part-time, Sigi earned
a physics degree at Brooklyn College and then two advanced
degrees at Syracuse University. In those college years, he
met the woman he soon married, Marilyn Brisman. When they
first met, she says, he was ``quiet, sweet, introspective,''
and, with his blond hair, blue eyes, and accent, so resembled
the archetype of a young German that she briefly thought him
one.
Exiting academe in 1957, Ziering did nuclear-reactor work
with Raytheon in Boston and then space projects at Allied
Research. The entrepreneurial urge hit, and with a friend he
started a company called Space Sciences to carry out cost-
plus government contracts.
It was the heyday of avaricious conglomerates, and in 1968
Whittaker Corp. bought Space Sciences for about $1.8 million.
That made Ziering, not yet 25 years removed from the
terrifying alphabetical lock step of Fuhlsbuttel prison,
well-to-do. But the deal also made him a California-based
research executive restless in Whittaker's conglomerate
culture.
He left and tried one entrepreneurial venture, the making
of fishmeal, that failed. Then, in 1973, he heard by chance
of a chemist working out of his Los Angeles kitchen, Robert
Ban, who'd developed radioimmunoassay (RIA) diagnostic kits
that permitted the measurement of infinitesimally low
concentrations of substances--drugs and hormones, for
example--in bodily fluids. Ban, a man with big ideas and a
corporate name to match them, Diagnostic Products Corp., had
been advertising in a professional journal that he had
upwards of 30 different RIA kits available. Some of these,
says Ziering, ``do not exist to this day,'' but that was
not known to the journal's readers, and sacks of orders--
though only morsels of money--landed in Ban's kitchen.
Ziering, warmed to the gamble by his long-standing interest
in medicine, put $50,000 into the business and moved the
chemist into a small factory that mainly produced one kit of
particular commercial value. The business took off. But the
partners were not getting along. So Ziering bought the
chemist out for $25,000 and settled back to working with a
more compatible partner, his wife, who has throughout the
years been a DPC marketing executive.
Today their company, competing with such giants as Abbott
Laboratories, has more than 1,400 employees and is a leading
manufacturer of both diagnostic kits and the analytical
instruments needed to read their findings. The company had
1997 sales of $186 million and profits of $18 million. DPC
went public in 1982, though Ziering wishes it hadn't--the
company has never really needed the money it raised, and he
doesn't like the volatility of the market or the second-
guessing of analysts--and he, his wife, their two sons (both
in the business), and two daughters own about 24% of its
stock, currently worth about $95 million.
Through most of its years, DPC has done well
internationally, a fact that has required Ziering and his
wife to travel often to Germany. Yes, it bothers him to go
back, but he thinks that his encounters with young Germans
disturb them more than him. When they get a hint of how he
spent the war, he says, ``you can feel the static electricity
in the air.''
In his business, says Marilyn Ziering, her husband is
patient and visionary, but also a risk taker when he needs to
be. He himself says he's a workaholic and muses as to why. He
wonders whether the ``training'' of the Holocaust--``unless
you work, you are destined for the gas chamber''--may not
have permanently bent him and many other survivors to work.
The license plate on Ziering's Jaguar reads ``K9HORA.''
That's a rough phonetic rendition of kayn aynhoreh, a Yiddish
expression meaning ``ward off the evil eye.'' It is
customarily tacked to the end of a thought, as a
superstitious precaution.
For these five survivors, who picked themselves up from the
worst and darkest of beginnings and triumphed in the best
tradition of the American dream, we might say, for example:
``Since the Holocaust, the lives of these men have been
good--kayn aynhoreh.''
Or we might stitch those words to a larger thought. Of the
Holocaust, Jews and the world say, ``Never again.'' In the
histories of these five men, there is a ringing, opposite
kind of message: ``Ever again.'' Evil weighed down their
early lives. But it did not--and cannot--crush the human
spirit.
Kayn aynhoreh.
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