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Peter Farago (above) was born in 1922 in Oradea, a medium-sized Romanian city with a significant Jewish community. At the age of seven, The Great Depression of 1929 arrived and plunged his family into poverty.
As a young boy, an American-born barber cut his hair. The man’s name, his background, how he came to live in Oradea… all lost in the mists of time. He introduced young Peter Farago to English, one of seven languages my father eventually mastered.
More importantly, he filled my father’s head with stories about the beauty, freedom and opportunity in a far away land called The United States.
"Streets paved with gold" propaganda? Not necessarily. If the barber convinced my father that the U.S. tolerated Jews, that would have been enough to create his a profound desire to emigrate. To escape economic desperation, and worse.
The Beginning of the End
The dark clouds of antisemitism were gathering throughout Eastern Europe. My father was forced to wear the Star of David on his sleeve – and beaten for the privilege. His education, his brothers’ careers, his father’s business, his mother’s ability to feed or clothe her family disappeared.
As my father entered his teens, Romania banned Jewish newspapers and publications. They disbanded Jewish sports organizations and clubs. They excluded Jews from higher education, restaurants, clubs – any and all aspects of communal civic life.
In the summer of 1942, three years after the onset of World War II, Romania ordered all male Jews in Oradea of military age to report for forced labor. My father and his two older brothers said goodbye to their parents and left the city, slaves for the Nazi war machine.
On March 19th, 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. On May 3rd, 1944, authorities interned Oradea’s 27k remaining Jews in two ghettos. They were denied food, water and sanitation. They tortured wealthier Jews to reveal their “hidden riches.” Then killed them.
The Extermination of Oradea's Jews
On May 23, 1944, almost exactly a year before World War 2 ended, Romania emptied Oradea’s Jewish ghettos. The crowded Jewish residents into trains and transported them to Auschwitz concentration camp.
All of Oradea’s Jews perished, save a small percentage of the young men sent to labor camps before the extermination campaign, who somehow managed to survive. Virtually everyone he he left behind – including his parents – were starved, beaten, shot or gassed to death.
The barber's fate ? Unknown. But his stories survived in my father's imagination. Despite being worked, beaten, starved and denied shelter from winter’s murderous cold, or perhaps because of it, my father survived the Holocaust with one life goal: to become an American.
Off to America
After the war, my father had no reason to return to Oradea. So he made his way to post-war Germany and applied his language skills to Jewish relief efforts. In his spare time, he joined a cadre of American soldiers relieving former Nazis of their cars, coins, stamps and other valuables. Funding his partying lifestyle.
Before you judge my father's post-war income, know this: he also risked his precious freedom to smuggle Jews into what became Israel. In one example, he secretly shepherded an entire trainload of Dutch Jewish orphans into kibbutzim (for example).
My father met my mother in Germany, where she worked for the Red Cross. He interrupted their affair to marry an American woman – for a Green Card and eventual citizenship. When he left Europe for the States, my mother made her way to Canada.
Their plan: reunite in The Land of the Free. And so they did, in Providence, Rhode Island, where my father eventually received a scholarship for The Rhode Island School of Design's textile engineering department.
Home at Last?
As I grew up I learned that there was no doubt in Peter Farago’s mind that the United States was the best country in the world, bar none. “In no other country in the world could I have made this life for me and you,” he’d tell me.
That said, my father didn’t see America through rose-colored glasses. He wrestled with anti-semitism in education, business and within the general culture. He was also a student of our nation’s checkered past, and lived through the violent social upheaval of the 60’s and 70’s.
Through it all, he supported and defended his adopted country deeply and completely. Despite its [obvious-to-him] faults.
My father repaid America by the sweat of his brow, building a successful business from the ground up. NEPTCO added to the strength and vitality of the economy. Giving other immigrants their shot at a better life, for them and their children.
Recently, I’ve been wondering what Peter Farago would have made of the millions of illegal immigrants pouring over our porous southern border.
He wouldn’t have questioned their motivation, nor withheld respect for their resolve. I reckon he would've welcomed these immigrants – via a process that screens them for danger and teaches the ones who qualify to be law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. And, just maybe, without that caveat.
Israel
I'm glad my father didn't live to see the October 7 massacre, or the resulting war against Hamas, Hezbollah and, now, Iran.
Even though Peter Farago loved his adoptive country, he had no illusions about the potential rise of deadly antisemitism within its borders. Like millions of Jews throughout the world, he saw Israel as the only safe place for Jews.
The fact that Israel's justifiable fight for survival is going well – and I make no apologies for saying so – would've given him little comfort. The Biden Administration's foot dragging on material support and craven calls for appeasement under the guise of a cease fire would've appalled him.
But again, it wouldn't have surprised him. Peter Farago taught me never to let apparent or professed kindness and concern blind me to the evil that hides in the hearts of men. And the fact that evil men hide in herds.
If I ever forget it, I remember the sardonic advice he gave my middle school during a talk about the Holocaust. “Keep your friends close,” he said with a wry smile. “And your enemies far, far away.”
In some ways, Peter Farago’s boyhood barber was the closest friend my father ever had. Or maybe the best. But one thing is for sure: I owe that man a debt of gratitude I can never repay. God rest his soul.
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Your father sounds like a good and wise man.