Joseph Sedacca’s children felt that their father was not like a normal person. They could tell that there was something psychologically wrong with their father.
Born in Turkey in 1916, Joseph was a Jew who came to the United States after World War II. He always looked suspicious, as if someone was threatening him. He spoke very loudly and often yelled at his children, and his nephews grew up fearing him.
Over the years, Joseph’s stories were often the talk of the dinner table, such as his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were exterminated. “Did he do any work in the camps?” They guessed, needless to say, that it must have been horrible.
Joseph Sedaka and Family at their Home in Queens, N.Y. Photo taken in the mid-1980s: top row, left to right, Janice, Joseph’s son David Joseph, son Albert, Janice’s mother Ada (Sarah’s sister), Joseph’s wife Sarah; (bottom left) Janice’s husband Ed; (bottom right) David’s then-wife Ivette. (Courtesy of Janice Clough)
Janice Clough, Joseph’s niece, remembers seeing her aunt always wearing long-sleeved clothes when she was a child. At a family gathering a few years later, when Joseph was wearing short sleeves, Janice’s youngest daughter was intrigued to see the numbers “112594” engraved on his forearm.
Janice thus began to explore her aunt’s tragic past.
Janice learned that these were what Joseph called “war numbers” and that for many years he kept the war a secret. It wasn’t until the 1960s that his children had grown up. Once they sat him down and coaxed him to drink more beer. He was so drunk that he finally told the story of his tragic past.
Each Time he opened his mouth he would sob uncontrollably and the children would say, “Dad, it’s okay, we’ll never talk about it again.”
(Top left) Janice talks about Joseph’s experience in an online interview in February 2021. (Right) Joseph and his wife Sarah. (Courtesy of Janice Clough)
Janice said in a recent interview, “Slowly little by little, they heard his story from him. And he only talks when he’s drunk, he usually doesn’t even mention it.”
Joseph was very young when his father died in World War I. He and his mother then moved to a Jewish living quarters in Salonika, Greece. His mother later remarried a wealthy grocer. When the Germans occupied the area during World War II, their living quarters suffered. The Germans confiscated their property for confiscation and transported them by train to various concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Josef was then separated from his mother, sister and nieces, whom he never saw again.
The photo shows prisoners being sorted in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration camp in Poland, taken around 1944.
In the camp, Josef’s brother died in his arms from malnutrition, and his stepfather died there as well. But Josef vowed to live no matter what. “He thought that the only way to defy them was to live and not be killed by them.” Janice speaks of how she has since focused on putting together her aunt’s story.
In the camps, Josef’s will was tested beyond imagination.
Roll call of the Buchenwald concentration camp, filmed around 1938-1941.
Each prisoner was assigned a job. Josef’s job was to cut the hair of German soldiers. He suffered many brutal beatings for no apparent reason, and his face was partially paralyzed and he lost so many teeth that he even smiled strangely afterwards. Janice said the beatings caused him to have severe headaches for the rest of his Life. Janice works as a Spanish teacher at John Jay High School in New York, and her colleagues are helping her sort out Joseph’s experiences.
Janice adds, “The German soldiers didn’t feed them and forced them to work long, intense hours. He was very good at finding Food everywhere: carrot roots, potato peels, etc. At one point he was so thirsty he had to drink horse urine. To survive, they would collect horse urine to quench their thirst.”
The power grid at Auschwitz.
The camp also held some Frenchmen, but they were treated a little better than the Jews and were very sympathetic to the Jews. The French helped Josef escape danger many times. On one occasion, Joseph was called to stand in a line and a Frenchman told him he had to leave that line. Joseph was a very quick and agile young man who immediately moved to another line and was thus spared the fate of being castrated.
Janice said the Frenchman was also in charge of the train that transported the prisoners and helped Joseph escape the camp and escape death.
Near the end of the war, as American and British troops advanced, the Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of their crimes. Joseph and the other prisoners were transported by train to the extermination camps. “They were going to take them to another kind of camp, kill them with gas and bury them in a big graveyard.” Janice said.
The rows of bodies in the concentration camp in Belsen, Nazi Germany, when it was liberated on April 15, 1945, were just the tip of the iceberg of unburied bodies on the ground.
A Frenchman told him ahead of time, “Halfway through you have to open the door and jump off. I’ll lie to them and say I locked the door, but I won’t really lock it. I’m telling you, you sit at the end of the line and you’re dead.”
To prevent the Jewish prisoners from escaping, they were forced to strip naked before being herded onto the train. The train slowed down on its way. Janice said, “Joseph squeezed to the door and pulled the train door open with the others – they helped him.” “As the French say, the door was unlocked.”
The entrance to the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
But at the last moment, Josef suddenly lost the courage to jump off the train.
Then he felt someone push behind him. He fell off the train and rolled down a ravine. Many prisoners also jumped off the train, and German soldiers began shooting at them, killing some.
Joseph was naked, and although it was cold outside, he survived. He wrapped his body in newspapers and trash scattered on the sides of the tracks to keep warm.
“He cowered in a pile of newspapers and rags and waited.” Janice said he weighed only 80 pounds when an American soldier found him. “Joseph also doesn’t remember how long he lay there, nearly unconscious. He was extremely hungry and severely dehydrated. Then the American soldiers took him to the truck and gave him blankets and some food. As his body couldn’t take it, he threw up everything he ate.”
A close-up of the Liberation Memorial commemorating the Holocaust, depicting an American soldier holding a Nazi death camp survivor, stands in Liberty State Park.
Around 1945, Allied forces occupied the camp and freed the survivors. Janice said that although the Germans tried to destroy all evidence of the camps, the sins were recorded in their extensive notebooks for posterity. She said the numbers carved on her aunt’s arms were recorded as a sign of survivorship in the “Auschwitz Chronicle.
Josef was taken to the hospital for treatment, and it took him a year to recover. After being discharged, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with anger issues and was diagnosed as mentally unstable. “He was treated and then discharged. He could have had the opportunity to go back to Salonika.” Janice said, but he refused to go back “because there were no more of his family there, everyone was gone.”
Fortunately, many Jews in New York are seeking to sponsor Holocaust survivors. During his hospitalization, Joseph received a letter that he could go to the United States, where a new family was willing to care for him. He accepted the invitation.
(top left) The cover of “The Auschwitz Chronicles”; (top right) one of the pages of “The Auschwitz Chronicles” showing Joseph Sedaka’s “war number,” indicating that he was imprisoned in a concentration camp; (bottom) Joseph Sedaka’s “war number. concentration camp; (bottom) Joseph Sedaka’s U.S. naturalization certificate. (Courtesy of Denise Clough)
Joseph stayed with his sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Beyo, in the Bronx, where they cared for him like Parents. Following Jewish tradition, Joseph met his wife (Janice’s aunt), Sarah Altabet, through a matchmaker, and in 1951 their eldest son, Benson, was born.
Over the years, Janice heard many stories about her aunt from her cousins, including one about Joseph’s chance encounter with a female refugee he had met in the camp. Joseph and his sons had just finished their bar mitzvah classes and were preparing to come to Janice’s home in the Bronx.
“We were all living in the Bronx.” Janice said a woman approached him on Grand Concourse Avenue …… and “my aunt stopped and my cousins looked at him while he stared at this woman. She and he stood face to face, then hugged and cried for a full 15 minutes as they snuggled up to each other.”
Janice’s cousins looked on in awe.
A street scene on Grand Concourse Avenue in the Bronx, New York, in November 2014.
“Then they let go of each other, dried their eyes, and exchanged words in Spanish.” Janice said, “Then the woman left while he and my cousins continued walking to my house.” When her cousin asked Joseph, “Dad, who was that man?” He replied, “That’s a woman I met during the war. We were locked up in the same concentration camp.”
While living in New York, Josef found work as a barber at St. Barnabas Hospital, shaving the hair of patients before surgery. Over the years, he received a lot of compensation from Germany and Janice collected a lot of records. He later qualified for a large payout from a Swiss bank, but died before he could collect it.
After retirement, Joseph moved with his wife to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he remained until his death in 2001 at the age of 86. He is survived by three sons, Benson, Albert and David, all now in their 60s and 70s. Joseph is survived by three grandchildren.
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