Elizabeth Bleiman, "I Love You More"

By Margie Fishman (her granddaughter)

“You will come back.”

That pronouncement, delivered by Jenő Zuckermann to his daughter, Elizabeth — whether intended as prophetic or merely as consolation before the family was forced into the Kisvárda Ghetto in April 1944, sustained Elizabeth through Auschwitz, beatings, starvation, digging trenches in the blistering heat, a two-month death march to Danzig through knee-deep snow, liberation by the Russians, and an extended hospital stay from black typhus.

When she finally returned home to Ófehértó, her village in northeastern Hungary, in the summer of 1945, she could not fathom a future there. Elizabeth decided to move to America, she would write later, because it was a country “where freedom prevails.”

In Philadelphia, she carved out a modest life as a homemaker with her husband and two children. She did not dwell on the past, she recounted later, because it would interfere with her forward momentum. She savored her independence and drove a car until she was 95 years old, balanced her checkbook until 102, and lived without home care aides until the final year of her life.

Elizabeth Bleiman (née Zuckermann) passed away peacefully at home in northeast Philadelphia on May 4, 2026. She was 104 years old, one of the oldest remaining Holocaust survivors in the Delaware Valley, and strong-willed until the end — refusing to wear hearing aids, carry her Life Alert, or take pain medicine. Not surprisingly, her plans for her Jewish burial had been meticulously organized (as were her day-to-day affairs) to make it easier on her children and grandchildren.

“There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living,” said the late Hannah Szenes (Senesh), a Hungarian poet and resistance fighter whom Elizabeth greatly admired.

Elizabeth’s light was undeniable. She smiled on sunny mornings and wore vibrant floral prints (but eschewed live flowers because they were too messy). She befriended strangers at the bus stop, chattering away in her charming Hungarian accent, and imparted feelings of comfort, safety, and value to those closest to her.

When family members ended their phone calls with “I love you,” she responded without hesitation: “I love you more.”

Halcyon Days

Born on July 10, 1921 in Ófehértó (“old white lake” in English), Erzsébet (Elizabeth) “Böske” Zuckermann confronted tragedy early in life when her mother, Rosa Grünwald Zuckermann, died of a miscarriage when her eldest daughter was just five years old.

Despite that watershed moment, Elizabeth remembered her childhood as tranquil. Her great-grandfather was a prominent landowner and built the family home. Her grandfather expanded it and erected a synagogue next door. She idolized her father, a well-respected owner of a successful building supply business that employed dozens of people in the village. Named after Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, Elizabeth was showered with gifts and trinkets from Jenő’s travels, as were her siblings, Ernő and Livia (Lili). Before bedtime each night, they recited a prayer in Yiddish for their late mother.

In 1929, Jenő decided to remarry and drafted Elizabeth, his dutiful middle child, to write a glowing letter (dictated by him) welcoming her soon-to-be stepmother, Anna Lorber Zuckermann.

“My dear, beautiful, darling mother,” it began.

The children were raised in a modern Orthodox household and attended Jewish high school in Debrecen, where they lived with a dear aunt. Jenő put Elizabeth in charge of distributing her siblings’ allowance (along with apologizing on their behalf whenever problems arose with their stepmother), further cementing the alliance between Elizabeth’s younger sister and older brother.

After graduation, Elizabeth enrolled in business classes, but her father encouraged her to return home in 1937 to find a husband. At the time, Hungarian universities were almost entirely closed to Jewish students.

As Western Europe fell to the Nazis, the Zuckermanns heard rumors but continued to discuss family matters — not politics — at the dinner table. They held out hope the Germans would be stopped before they came for Hungary.

“If You’re Crying, You Will Never Make It”

Following the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, all Jews were ordered to wear a yellow Star of David and to always carry citizenship identification cards. Jenő’s business collapsed. On the final day of Passover, approximately 110 Jews living in Ófehértó were told they had 24 hours to pack up their belongings. Lili was studying in Budapest at the time and Ernő had been conscripted into an unarmed labor battalion of Jewish men under the Royal Hungarian Army. Jenő took Elizabeth aside to discuss where he had buried the family’s valuables for when she would return home.

Terrified, Elizabeth could not focus. “We’re going together and we all come back together,” she pleaded with him.

She accompanied her parents and extended family on the 21-mile trip to the Kisvárda Ghetto. Upon arrival, Elizabeth volunteered as a nurse at a makeshift hospital.

Two months later, the family was deported to Auschwitz. The first time Elizabeth saw German soldiers was at the train station, where they crammed every Jew into a cattle car with barred windows up top that afforded only a sliver of sky. Piercing through the moans and sobs, a young girl began to sing like a bird, Elizabeth would recall later. In the corner was one defecation bucket, emptied once daily.

As the guards opened the doors to Auschwitz, Elizabeth tried to focus on the stars and take deep breaths of fresh air, but the stench from the crematorium overwhelmed her. The men and women were immediately separated and Jenő kissed his daughter a final goodbye and urged her to stay with her stepmother.

The crowd surged and Elizabeth’s aunt and three young children went ahead in the selection line. They were immediately sent to the left, which signified the gas chambers. Gripping her stepmother’s arm, Elizabeth recalled that the pair approached Josef Mengele, an SS officer and notorious physician dubbed “the angel of death.” He motioned for Anna to move to the left, but Elizabeth pleaded in German to stay with her stepmother. He raised his stick and separated their arms with a sharp blow, knocking Elizabeth down into the mud.

Elizabeth was stripped and shaved by dawn, marched to Lager C, block 29, unfinished barracks with a dirt floor and three-story bunks. (Late in the war, the Nazis did not have the time to tattoo numbers on prisoners’ arms.) Elizabeth, 23, befriended three Hungarian women close to her age: Elizabeth Varna (who was also nicknamed “Böske”), Margit Simon, and her relative, Lili Simon.

The four women stood for hours each morning in the selection line that determined whether they would live another day. They were given a small cauldron of watery soup to share as a group and one piece of bread each at night. Elizabeth watched fellow prisoners run headfirst into the electrified barbed wire. One day, she was crying inconsolably and an elderly German political prisoner told her to stop. “If you’re crying, you will never make it,” he said, pointing to the crematorium smoke that never dissipated. He encouraged her to be selected for the first transport leaving Auschwitz and gave her a piece of pork skin, which she kept but wouldn’t eat because it wasn’t kosher.

The next day, Elizabeth and her friends maneuvered themselves onto a transport leaving for Stutthof, a work camp with no crematorium on-site, but brutal all the same. In August, they positioned themselves to be chosen for a satellite work camp near Praust that housed hundreds of Jewish women building an airport. Each day, as they dug trenches for cables, wearing only rags and cement bags, they prayed for no sunshine to save their backs from blisters.

One day, Elizabeth developed a painful abscess and a Jewish doctor cut it out without any anesthetic. She was ordered to return to work by the Kapo, a Jewish prisoner assigned by the SS to manage the workers in exchange for an extra food ration. When Elizabeth protested that she was in agony, the overseer raised a hand to strike her, and Elizabeth’s arm reflexively went up to block her. A German solider witnessed the interaction and beat Elizabeth. She was back at work the next day.

As the months wore on, the Jewish prisoners retrofitted the cement bags as insulation from the bitter wind. French prisoners passed Elizabeth and her friends notes that the Russians and Americans were advancing, keeping hope alive.

By February, Elizabeth could hear gunfire in the distance. She and about 400 other prisoners were evacuated by the SS to prevent liberation (and to hide the Nazis’ atrocities) and marched toward the Polish port city of Danzig (Gdańsk). Severely emaciated and wearing paper bags for shoes, they spent nearly two months trudging through several feet of snow, sleeping as pairs in barns to avoid getting raped by the soldiers. Those who fell behind were shot.

As they approached Danzig, the sounds of gunshots and sirens intensified. Clinging to life, Elizabeth and her friends found an empty building and fell asleep. When they awoke, the SS guards were gone. “You are free,” the Russian soldiers told them, but they were also on their own because the war was not officially over.

They cried, they laughed, they kissed, and then they raided the kitchen cabinets and pantries of all the houses nearby. The Germans living in them were in such a hurry that they left multi-course dinners with fine silverware on the table.

Elizabeth woke up the next day with a severe stomachache and fever. She blacked out and was transported to a hospital, where she spent six weeks recovering from typhus. Her three friends contracted the same illness; Margit and Lili died at the hospital.

The two Böskes made their way back to Hungary, hopping packed trains without knowing where they were headed. Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces on May 7, 1945. The pair arrived in Hungary in June, promised to keep in touch (with no phone numbers or permanent addresses), and went their separate ways forever.

“We felt guilty that we came back,” Elizabeth recalled in a later interview. “We suffered everything together.”

While she was waiting alone for the train that would take her to Ófehértó, Elizabeth saw a packed cattle car pass, only this time it was full of German prisoners headed to Russia. She considered throwing a stone at them but looked at their hollowed faces and could not bring herself to do it. She never forgave them, however.

Elizabeth disembarked at the village train station with a headscarf, an ill-fitting dress, and a jacket she had found. On the walk home, she met the family’s former maid, who told her that her siblings were still alive. (Shortly after, Elizabeth reunited with them in Debrecen. Ernő had been liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and Lili had a baby girl, Zsuzsi.) Of the slightly more than 100 Jewish people who had left Ófehértó for the ghetto, Elizabeth knew only a half dozen who returned.

Elizabeth’s family home had been ransacked and there were Romanian refugees living there when she arrived. She managed to recover a few items buried by her father but was determined to leave Hungary.

Moving On

Eager to move to the United States, Elizabeth decided to accompany a cousin to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp run by the Americans in Feldafing, Germany, since they had relatives there. It was illegal to leave Hungary at the time, so in August 1946 they paid to be smuggled across the Austrian border in a delivery truck before taking the train to Germany.

The DP was overcrowded and difficult to enter for a person of Hungarian descent. One of Elizabeth's cousins was already there and shared the same birth year, so Elizabeth pretended to be her sister and said she was born in 1923, not 1921. (That fake birth date of July 10, 1923 followed her to America; she would later lament that she missed out on two full years of Social Security.)

Yiddish was the common language in the camp but Elizabeth could only speak Hungarian and German. A Lithuanian teacher, who also had lost most of his family in the war, offered to tutor her. Although he was a full decade older, Elizabeth recognized that Motel Bleiman was a kindhearted man like her father. The couple wed at a synagogue in Munich on March 8, 1947 and their daughter, Hannah Rosalind (named after the deceased mothers of Motel and Elizabeth), arrived on July 14, 1948.

Motel wanted to move to Israel because he had relatives there, but, at Elizabeth’s insistence, the family emigrated to America aboard a U.S. military ship in 1949. They initially settled in Lakewood, New Jersey, where family members pooled their resources to give Elizabeth and Motel $500 to start their new life. They stumbled through learning English and rented a room from a widow who complained that Elizabeth used too much water when she washed Hannah’s bottles.

“I came to America after the concentration camp and we still don’t have enough water,” Elizabeth cried to her husband. She was miserable in this unfamiliar country and yearned for her life before the war.

The family resettled in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia near where Elizabeth’s aunt lived. Motel took a job as a door-to-door egg salesman. Later, the couple became house parents at a group home for 18 Jewish children, before moving to Harrisburg so that Motel could work as a junkyard dealer and farmer. He eventually found a teaching position at Beth Jacob in West Philadelphia and at other synagogues nearby. Elizabeth worked as a bookkeeper and assistant at a Jewish bookstore. Their son, Jack Abraham (named for the deceased fathers of Motel and Elizabeth), was born on Feb. 2, 1956.

That summer, the family bought their first house in Mount Airy. Later that year, Ernő and his wife moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Lili remained in Hungary behind the Iron Curtain.

During the summers, the Bleimans vacationed in Bradley Beach, New Jersey while Motel and Elizabeth took turns working at a cousin’s produce store.

Elizabeth assumed the role of disciplinarian in the family and managed the finances. “She was the driving force behind any kind of change,” Hannah remembered.

In 1958, Elizabeth learned how to drive—a pastime she enjoyed for nearly six decades even if the drivers stuck behind her snail-paced vehicle did not. Her first teacher, an elderly man, discouraged her from getting her license, but she dropped him.

Elizabeth spoke her mind. If someone’s hair looked unkempt, she let them know. Even at 102 years old, she dressed up in a stylish silk scarf and pillbox hat with a bird cage veil.

She “always spoke with a vibrant, expressive and strong voice in English but she seemed even more animated when she spoke Hungarian,” recalled her granddaughter, Joan Shavit. She occasionally mixed up Hungarian and English words, calling crumbs cramps, but she got along fine.

Elizabeth was proud of her Jewish heritage, but she went back to Hungary only a few times over the course of her life — most recently in 2003 to take a multi-generational trip. She refused to set foot in Germany.

An ardent supporter of Israel, Elizabeth was acutely aware of the significance of a Jewish homeland; it was one of her great regrets that she was never able to visit the country. A trip she had planned in the early 2000s was canceled due to the Second Intifada.

For much of her life, she declined to talk about her Holocaust experience in detail, refusing to be trapped by painful memories. She quoted Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher: “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”

At the urging of Jack, and, later, Joan, she wrote down her life story and completed extended interviews with Gratz College and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Elizabeth was an active listener, who really took the time to hear and understand people, but she was also quite an active talker. She often went off on meandering tangents and when she finally arrived at the original point all she could do was laugh.

Before Lili died at age 100 due to complications from dementia, Elizabeth would call her sister in Hungary each week and sing her favorite Hebrew songs until her voice was hoarse. (Longevity blessed the siblings; Ernő died at age 99.)

Family was paramount to Elizabeth. She cooked for all the Jewish holidays and barely sat down for the actual meal because she was too busy bringing out all the delicious food—stuffed cabbage with raisins, blintzes filled with cottage cheese and jelly, breaded chicken cutlets, kugel, and banana bread. (She even made kosher for Passover food taste good.)

When family members were ready to leave, it took another 20 minutes to get out the door, because she loaded them up with bags of leftovers that she had meticulously packed in plastic containers, wrapped in tinfoil and secured with rubber bands lest anything spill on the car ride home.

Elizabeth always came prepared with a plucky attitude and hard candy in her purse. She and Motel enjoyed taking the casino-sponsored bus for seniors to Atlantic City, with the added bonus of $20 per passenger for gambling. The couple pocketed the money and walked on the boardwalk.

She had an affinity for numbers and listened to Harry Gross’ investment advice on the radio. She ended up investing in the Windsor and Wellington mutual funds because they sounded regal and came out ahead.

Elizabeth always wanted to share the latest bit of relationship or healthy living advice that she gleaned from the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent or by listening to Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil (at a time when they were still considered legitimate professionals). She cut out inspirational quotes and her favorite newspaper articles — “40 Tips for a Wonderful Life,” “Forgiveness and Your Health” — and saved them in scrapbooks to share with her family at a moment’s notice.

After her husband of 52 years died on June 9, 1999 due to complications from Alzheimer’s, Elizabeth continued to volunteer at her northeast Philadelphia synagogue, Temple Beth Ami; visit the local library; attend luncheons and programs through the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Philadelphia, KleinLife, and Jewish Family and Children's Service of Greater Philadelphia; and maintain a lifetime membership to Hadassah. She enjoyed reading books with Jewish themes, reciting Psalm 23 for comfort, and humming “I Believe,” sung by Jane Froman, or Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days.”

She often drove her friend, Editha Charney, to Shabbat services. One time when Elizabeth went to pick her up at her complex, Editha did not come out. Her front door was locked, so Elizabeth flagged down a maintenance person to open it. They found Editha stuck in a bathtub full of water, unable to get up. She later wrote a thank you card to Elizabeth, calling her a “guardian angel."

In the book, “If I Live to be 100,” which Elizabeth appreciated, author Neenah Ellis writes that “most of the centenarians were models of perseverance and positive thinking. They had open minds and open hearts. They were curious, generous and fun.”

That describes Elizabeth to a tee.

Her handwritten life story ends with this quote, adapted from "Little House on the Prairie":

“Remember me with love and laughter. That is my wish, most of all. If you can remember me with sadness only, don’t remember me at all.”

***

Elizabeth is survived by her loving daughter Hannah Fishman (Dr. Robert) and son Jack Bleiman (Linda Joseph), devoted grandchildren, Joan Shavit (Dr. Adam), Marjorie Fishman and Matthew Bleiman, and dear step-great-grandson Jonathan Shavit. She is also survived by her cherished nephew Gabor Boda (Cindy) and niece Zsuzsi Bodai, and was predeceased by nephew Steve Boda (Ruth).

Friends wishing to make a contribution in her memory may contribute to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum www.ushmm.org, Hadassah www.hadassah.org, Temple Beth Ami, 9201 Old Bustleton Ave, Philadelphia PA 19115, or to a charity of the donor’s choice.