    [Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 10, 2018)]
    [Extensions of Remarks]
    [Page E24]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                     HONORING THE LIFE OF PHILIP MARKOWICZ

                                     ______

                               HON. MARCY KAPTUR

                                    of ohio

                        in the house of representatives

                          Wednesday, January 10, 2018

      Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the extraordinary
    life of Philip Markowicz, who was a resident of Sylvania, Ohio and
    Aventura, Florida. Phil was also a renowned author and lecturer on the
    Holocaust and Judaism as a survivor of the Holocaust. As a business
    leader, he founded Phil's TV and Appliance in Toledo, Ohio.
      Phil was born in 1924 in Przerab, Poland where he attended the
    Przedborz Yeshiva and was known as a Bible and Talmud prodigy, and had
    the intention of becoming ordained as a rabbi.
      Unfortunately, the 1939 Nazi Invasion of Poland shutdown the
    Przedborz Yeshiva and as a teenager through the first years of World
    War II Phil was confined in the Lodz Ghetto working as a slave laborer
    under Nazi rule. He spent all of his nonworking time in intensive study
    of many of the classic works of history, philosophy and political
    thought, supplementing his orthodox religious studies.
      When the Lodz Ghetto was dismantled, Phil was deported by the Nazis
    to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He realized that staying there
    meant certain death and he sneaked into an outside work detail,
    avoiding the gas chambers and crematoria. Along with his brother,
    Henry, he survived slave labor concentration camps, disease, beatings
    and starvation, culminating in a death march, until he was liberated by
    the American forces in the spring of 1945. His body was wracked with
    typhus and tuberculosis and he weighed only 87 pounds. He and his
    brother were the only survivors of the Holocaust--their entire family
    had perished.
      After a few months of recovery in a hospital, Phil was sent to a
    Displaced Persons camp in Germany where he was elected to the governing
    council. It was there that he met and married his wife, Ruth Fajerman
    Markowicz, who was also a Holocaust survivor, and they had a son, Allen
    Markowicz. The Markowicz marriage and the birth of their son were the
    first of each in the camp.
      After waiting for five years, the family was permitted to immigrate
    to the United States in 1950, and upon arriving in Toledo, Ohio, Phil
    found employment, sometimes working two or three jobs at a time while
    studying the newly growing field of television and electronics. In less
    than 10 years Phil and his wife Ruth established a successful business,
    Phil's TV and Appliance, and added two daughters to their family,
    Sylvia and Diane.
      Phil eventually resumed his study of Torah. He wrote a well-received
    memoir, My Three Lives. A musical oratorio which was inspired by Mr.
    Markowicz's life and philosophical writings, Tikvah (Hope), has been
    performed at the Toledo Museum of Art; in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois;
    at Bowling Green State University; at the Detroit Holocaust Memorial
    Museum; in North Carolina; at the Jewish Theater of the South in
    Atlanta; and was part of the Martin Luther King Memorial Week
    ceremonies in Atlanta in 2006. Phil was a featured interviewee on the
    award-winning documentary Bearing Witness: The Voices of Our Survivors.
      Phil spoke on the Holocaust and on Torah at various venues, including
    Universities, secondary schools, religious institutions, seminars and
    Public Television. He was invited to lead religious services, read from
    the Torah and its accompanying Haftorah, and present sermons. Phil
    served as a president of the Tarbuth Society, one of the Torah study
    groups in which he participated, and was a member of Congregation B'nai
    Israel in Sylvania, Ohio and the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center
    Synagogue in Aventura, Florida.
      In addition to his wife, Ruth, he was preceded in death by his
    daughter, Diane Markowicz; his brother, Henry Markowicz; and the rest
    of his family in the Holocaust.
      Phil will ultimately be remembered for his dedication to his family,
    and we offer his children, Dr. Allen and Sylvia, his nine grandchildren
    and nine great-grandchildren, and his friends our prayers. May they
    find comfort in the poignant and profound memories of what Phil endured
    and survived, and what his life has embodied for generations to come.

                              ____________________