Moshe Nurtman

The Times Newspaper

Although Moishe Nurtman was one of 732 child Holocaust survivors given the chance of a new life in England in 1945, he was actually too old to qualify for the scheme by three years, having been born in 1924. Because of his diminutive stature and undernourishment the committee took pity and issued him with a false birth certificate stating that he was born in 1929.

He was one of five siblings who came from Warka, a town 60 kilometres south of Warsaw. His father, Israel, who had a grocery shop, used to buy wheat from the local farmers and sell it to the mill, while his mother, Sarah, looked after the shop. Nurtman was 14 when the Germans invaded. At first they rounded up Jews to do menial jobs such as road-sweeping and clearing snow and created a ghetto in the nearby town of Kozienice. Since Jews were permitted to live on the eastern side of the Vistula river, Nurtman’s father took the family to a village called Mniszew, where they rented rooms from an old lady in an isolated fisherman’s shack. Nurtman used to cross the river with his mother to get food from his father’s former customers in the Volksdeutsche villages. It was risky since if caught they would probably have been killed. After a while an order was given to remove Jews from this area as well. The authorities kept 300 men in Mniszew to dig trenches for drainage of the surrounding farmland, because in winter the Vistula flooded. Israel Nurtman was one of them, while Moishe accompanied his mother and siblings to the ghetto in Kozienice. His older brother Benjamin, 18, went into hiding rather than become a forced labourer, but was caught and killed. In September 1942 Nurtman escaped the ghetto and was hidden by a Polish family who later gave him a lift in a cart to where his father was living 40km away. There he heard that the ghetto had been emptied and all its inhabitants sent to Treblinka, where his mother, Sarah, 38, and his siblings Esther Brandel, 16, Samuel, 11, and Rose, 8, would all perish. Nurtman was taken to the nearby Skarzysko-Kamienna labour camp for two years, where he was a forced labourer at a munitions factory. He was there until 1944 when the Russians were advancing towards the area and, although separated from his father, considered himself lucky to be given a job as a van driver bringing food for the camp guards from a kitchen in Warka twice daily. Thus he was able to buy bread. As the Red Army advanced closer, he and the other Jews were sent by train to Buchenwald concentration camp, where Nurtman was billeted in the kinder block. At the camp he found his father, who by now was unable to walk. His kidneys had seized up and he died of starvation soon afterwards. The day before Buchenwald was liberated, Nurtman was part of a group sent to Theresienstadt. By morning the guards had departed and he walked out of the camp heading for the nearest town. “The first day we looked for bread, the next day for chocolate, the third day we looked for money,” he recalled. He began bartering and trading tinned meat, and sold a hat to a Russian soldier, flattering his customer to secure the sale. It was an approach that he would use years later when selling menswear to friends and acquaintances. Flown by Lancaster bombers from Prague to an airfield near Carlisle in August 1945, with a stopover in the Netherlands, Nurtman and a couple of hundred other children, mostly boys, were taken to a hostel by Windermere, where they were given a basic education and taught to speak English. After Windermere he was sent to a religious hostel in Stamford Hill and first went to work for a diamond-dealer. Short in stature and stout of build, he used to joke that he was too light for heavy work and too heavy for light work. Later he inherited two large houses in Salzburg from an uncle who had died intestate and was able to use the proceeds to enter the textile business as a manufacturer of women’s underwear. He kept an ad hoc office in the coffee shop at the Great Western Hotel in King’s Cross, north London, and grew the business to employ 135 people at his factories in Nottingham. He married a tall South African, Jessie Miller, whom he met while she was on holiday in the UK; she came from a Lithuanian immigrant family with a dairy farm outside Cape Town. By the late 1960s Nurtman and his growing family were living in Stanmore, northwest London, but several years later he became clinically depressed and was placed in a home for the mentally ill in Harrow. He was persuaded to sign over all his business assets, which he bitterly regretted. When he emerged in 1981 he went to Israel for nine years, living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Upon his return to London he gradually took up business again, this time as a casual trader without a premises. He had friends in the menswear business, and one wholesale business that specialised in formal menswear sold him overruns and misfits, which he would sell on to market traders. Next, he befriended a couple of Russian sailors, who brought in a steady supply of Havana cigars when their ships docked. These were much in demand in the UK, but even more so in America after the boycott of Cuba. Many of his customers were American diplomats, expatriates, and visitors, who would pay handsomely for the best Cuban cigars. One customer was “Mr President”, Michael Day, the Franciscan friar who ran the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly for several years. Nurtman was also a regular attender at the Porchester Turkish Baths, near Queensway, where he would sell goods to fellow patrons on the quiet, ranging from garments to cigars and caviar. He lived in a flat in Maida Vale, west London, receiving money from the German government in war reparations, and earned an income from his cigar and clothing businesses. Later he was looked after by the Association of Jewish Refugees and Jewish Care, residing at a home in Golders Green, north London. If he went to a restaurant or was hosted for a meal, he would still surreptitiously pocket bread rolls from the table, a habit derived from his fear of going hungry during the war. The first time Nurtman returned to Poland was in 1996. In his native town his parents’ grocery store had been replaced by a flower stall. He found a property that had belonged to his grandfather but eight apartments had been built in its place and, even though he had the title deeds, he was advised not to pursue any claim for restitution. Nurtman is survived by his former wife and his three sons, Howard, Mickey, and Saul, who all took degrees at the University of Cape Town. Saul co-founded Calculus Solutions, a telecoms and event-based billing company, in 1998, selling out two years later; Howard is director of compliance for a life science investment in Los Angeles; and Mickey is a London-based banker with Investec, specialising in structured property finance. To the last Nurtman spoke in a Polish accent and enjoyed telling jokes. A favourite was one he told to an oral historian. A man offers up a prayer. “Please, God, help me win the lottery,” he asks. God replies: “Meet me halfway and buy a ticket.” Moishe Nurtman, Holocaust survivor and businessman, was born on December 26, 1924. He died in his sleep on December 17, 2020, aged 95