http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060708/NEWS08/307080005/1001/OBITUARIES03

Holocaust survivor Fishel dies at 79

The owner of a deli bearing his name fought everyone from criminals to war profiteers for what he thought was right.

JEFFREY PATCH
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

July 8, 2006

David Fishel, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Des Moines, died Saturday at the Hospice Kavanagh House in Des Moines of pancreatic cancer. He was 79.

[highlight]Fishel, who was born in Bedzin, Poland, spent 3 1/2 years in concentration camps before his liberation on April 13, 1945.[/highlight]

Friends and neighbors knew him as the colorful and hard-nosed owner of Fishel’s Deli on Sixth Avenue, which he operated from 1968 to 1975.

Fishel, who worked 10-12 hours per day, was loud, abrupt and ran his business with a forceful manner because Des Moines in the 1960s was turning violent, friends and family said.

Pat Blunck worked for the Communications Workers of America in the building next to Fishel’s Sixth Avenue Deli. She said working near Fishel always proved exciting.

“David always threatened anybody that tried to hold him up,” said Blunck, who knew Fishel for over 30 years. “One day I heard this loud yelling and screaming and I looked out the window and there was David, with a gun in hand, chasing someone across Sixth Avenue.
And David wasn’t a big, burly guy. He was close to the ground and rather round.”

In 1968, the year he bought the deli, he was smacked over the head with a bottle and robbed of $50, according to Des Moines Register archives. With a blood-covered face he chased the robber down the sidewalk but never caught him.

“It was very frightening,” said Fishel’s wife Louise who ran the deli with him. “I was very nervous. It was hard.”

In 1970, he was again looking down the barrel of a gun before reaching into his back pocket for his own gun.

“I pointed it at them and asked them where they wanted it first,” he told police then, “and they turned around and ran.”

In 1973, he had had enough. He engaged robbers in a shoot out, firing six shots at the fleeing burglars.

At the point, however, he decided he didn’t survive horrors in Europe “to get blown away on Sixth Avenue.”

Louise said that her husband could not sit idle in the presence of wrongdoing — a lesson he learned from personal trials during the Holocaust.

“My husband always said, 'if there was something wrong, make it right,’ ” Louise said.

She said her husband gave out free food to poor neighborhood residents, especially children — another moral trait seared into his personality because of the hardships he endured in the concentration camps. “He said he could never look away from somebody who was hungry,” she said.

Fishel’s relatives said he poured the entirety of his being into his work.

“He was a real meat and potatoes person,” said Robert Aronson, Fishel’s son-in-law. “I remember taking him for sushi once and I never heard the end of it.”

When he closed the Sixth Avenue location, Fishel sold the building to Frank Solar, but he opened delis in other locations, including Merle Hay Mall, before retiring in 1997.

Blunck drove by Fishel’s house this week and told her husband that she had to call Dave and Louise.

She said she regrets that she never did — and now never will get the chance.

“We had a lot of good times. We had a lot of fun together,” she said. “He never lost his little accent. He always called me Patsy.”

[highlight]Fishel was imprisoned Jan. 13, 1942, and dug ditches and repaired plumbing in six different concentration camps.[/highlight]

His mother and three siblings died during the Holocaust, friends said.
Only Fishel and his brother survived — by eating food meant for hogs, drinking melted snow and quietly toiling in the labor camps.

Sam Bobb, a friend of Fishel’s for about 50 years, said Fishel eventually decided to speak about the Holocaust after decades of silence.

“He would not talk about it for years. Finally he said, 'I’ve got to tell my story because they’re all dying off,’” said Bobb, who met Fishel at their synagogue, Beth El Jacob. “He never felt sorry for himself.”

Bobb said Fishel maintained an optimistic outlook despite the devastation he endured.

“He never got depressed,” Bobb said. “He was all gung-ho. If things went bad he still didn’t get depressed. He kept going. He just accepted life as it came to him.”

Fishel filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Des Moines in 1996 seeking compensation for his enslavement during the Holocaust.

He sought payment — plus 50 years of accrued interest — from what remains of the I.G. Farben Co., for which he mixed cement, did construction work and shoveled coal while in captivity. I.G. Farben exists mostly as a trust to settle compensation claims stemming from the war.

The company denied Fishel’s request for a settlement, and he sued the company’s descendents — BASF Group, Hoechst AG, the Bayer Group, Daimler-Benz AG and Fried Krupp GMBH — many of which have merged further, creating new companies.

A federal judge threw out his lawsuit in March 1998.

“I’m not going to roll over and play dead,” Fishel told the Register. “The bastards cannot get away with it.”

All Fishel ever received was $402 from the Swiss government for personal belongings lost in the war.

Fishel, who had the inmate number 184570 tattooed on his arm, said he had no way of knowing whether his name was among 300,000 claims approved for compensation.

“I have been signing papers for 10, even 20 years. I hope I am,” he said. “But it’s all talk, talk, talk. They are waiting for us all to die — that’s what they are doing.”

Fishel had pancreatic cancer for about a year, but doctors only diagnosed the illness about three weeks ago. His family, who said [highlight]Fishel was tormented by Holocaust flashbacks on his deathbed[/highlight], was at his hospice bedside.

[color="Blue"](Oy vey, geysers of blood and color-coded crematorium smoke!)

Lisa Cohen, Fishel’s granddaughter, said he was a “selfless, upbeat person.”

“He was a friend as well as a grandfather,” said Cohen, who mentioned that Fishel taught her how to play poker and ride a bike. “I could call him and talk about anything.”

Fishel is survived by his wife of 53 years, Louise; two daughters, Bobbi Aronson of Minneapolis and Eileen Schwartzman of Kansas City, Kan.; sons-in-law, Robert Aronson and Dr. Michael Schwartzman; four grandchildren, Lisa, Dustin, Adam and Aaron; nieces, Renee Zack and Edie Tsbari; and a cousin, Rink Fox.