Daughter of Holocaust survivor shares father’s journey with Rostraver Township Historical Society

Sue Roth Tresatti wants to keep the memories of what Holocaust survivors went through alive for future generations.

The daughter of a Holocaust survivor shared her father’s harrowing story of how he went from a boy to a man during some of the darkest moments in history.

During a presentation Tuesday at the Rostraver Historical Society, Sue Roth Tresatti told an audience of about 75 people she is passionate about keeping her father’s story alive.

The daughter of Norman Roth, who died in 2022, Tresatti said on her way to Rostraver Township she decided to title her presentation “10437,” the serial number the Germans tattooed on her father’s arm when he went into the camps during World War II.

More than six million Jewish people from all over Europe were killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust between 19411945, with one million of them at Auschwitz alone.

Roth was a young boy from Roscoff in what was then Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis began to take over, he was a 13-year-old boy going to school in Hungary. When the Germans forbade Jewish people to travel, he broke the law to return to his family. Shortly after his return home; his family and his Jewish neighbors were rounded up by the authorities.

Roth was haunted by the memory of watching his Jewish neighbors being marched through the streets to the cattle cars while they were spit on and called obscenities.

After being shipped to Auschwitz, Roth’s little sister was taken away by the Germans. When his mother protested, she was allowed to go with her daughter. Roth later learned that both his mother and sister were sent to the gas chambers.

An older man told Roth’s father, “Tell the Germans your son is 18.” Tresatti’s grandfather did just that and this act saved his life as the men over 18 were sent to a work camp.

Large for his age, Roth was chosen to be the personal servant of one of the camp’s guards, which he said was one of the better jobs. One of his assigned tasks was to care for the guard’s horses. Roth was able to smuggle some of the animal’s grain and apples back to the barracks to share with his father. Roth described the guard’s behavior as “Jekyll and Hyde,” sometimes benign and at other times they beat him with a whip.

When the American troops approached the camp, Roth and his fellow prisoners were forced to make a “death march” to another camp. He related an incident where an older man fell down in the snow, and Roth was not allowed to help him before a guard shot him. Roth himself suffered frostbite on the march. Eventually they were put in a camp where the American troops caught up with them. Roth recalled that he did not realize how bad he looked until he saw the look on the American GI’s faces when they saw the survivors.

After the German’s defeat, refugees like Roth were sent back to their homes. In Roth’s case, his home was now behind the Iron Curtain. Along with his father, a sister and an uncle, they fled to Hungary where they could go west. It was decided that Roth would go first and the others would follow. Roth escaped but his family could not.

As a minor he was placed in a displaced person’s camp. There he learned that anyone who spoke English might have a chance to emigrate to the United States. Roth taught himself English and was sponsored by a family in Dover, Del. Once in America, Roth joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea.

At a friend’s wedding, Roth met a girl from Pittsburgh, fell in love, started a business in Pittsburgh, and raised two children before retiring to Florida with his wife.

Tresatti said that she never knew anything about her father’s wartime experiences.

Her father only opened up about the Holocaust after he met a fellow camp survivor while waiting in a buffet line in Florida. He noticed the man’s camp tattoo and they began talking. Roth had his own marking surgically removed. The other survivor told Roth it was important that he tell his story. The man recalled hearing the advice to lie about his age at the camp.

The encounter between the two survivors changed her father’s perspective after years of holding his tortured memories under close guard. It also energized Tresatti to speak out on his behalf.

She worked with her father to record and share his history. She said that there was “another strange twist in the story.” When she was a child her father learned his father, uncle and his sister had survived. His uncle had spent time in a Soviet jail, his father had remarried and started a new family, while his sister was in Connecticut.

Tresatti remembers traveling to Europe as a child to meet her grandfather. She said her grandfather’s modest village made her feel like she was on the set of “Fiddler on the Roof” and that they were “very, very poor.” She didn’t speak her grandfather’s language, but she remembers the look of pride on her grandfather’s face when he learned that his “son was an American.”

Tresatti said she is alarmed at the rise in the number of hate crimes in the United States. She said that hate comes from a lack of knowledge and once people get to know one another it is difficult to hate them. After her talk Tresatti, answered many questions from the audience, some of whom were moved to tears by her talk.