[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.

                          ____________________