The untold story of how Jon Ossoff’s cousin survived the Holocaust and got to the US
He escaped a death march, foraged for food in the forest and placed an ad seeking a long-lost aunt in the Forward
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff speaks at a campaign event in Atlanta in March 2024. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
By Andrew Silverstein May 7, 2024
The ad appears on the bottom of Page 3 of the Feb. 13, 1946, edition of the Forward, a single sentence in Yiddish among a hundred similar ones that day alone. “Schochet, Hinde and Chana of Boston or Peabody,” it reads, “greetings from Ethel Shochet’s son from Molėtai, currently in Germany.”
Ethel Shochet’s son was named Nochim. He was 22, and one of only two of the family’s 70 members to survive the Holocaust. He had broken away from a concentration camp in Estonia while on a forced march and hidden in a forest until the end of the war.
Nochim wrote to the Forward from a displaced persons camp. Chana Schochet — by then Annie Ossoff, having married and changed her first name after leaving Europe in 1913 — saw the ad and sponsored his visa to the United States. By 1949, Nochim was called Nathan and living in Annie’s home in Peabody and working at a nearby chemical plant.
And on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Annie’s great-grandson, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, told the story.
“Nathan realized he had no family left in Europe, and he had no future in Europe,” Ossoff said at a ceremony at the Memorial to the Six Million in Atlanta. “The Forward remains an influential Jewish publication,” he added. “I can only infer that it was universally read at the time because Nathan’s cousin Annie saw the ad.”
Nathan Krugman and Annie Ossoff were among thousands of Jews who reconnected through “Seeking Relatives,” a column of classified ads that ran in the Forward for decades, and whose critical role in saving and changing lives I wrote about last fall. So when I heard Ossoff mention Nathan’s ad, I reopened the archives to see what more I could learn about his story.
The Jewish senator from Georgia, who has spoken about Nathan before, is not the only famous person connected to Seeking Relatives. Jared Kushner’s grandparents also found a relative to sponsor their immigration to the U.S. through the Forward, as did the parents of Esther Safran Foer, whose three sons — Jonathan, Franklin and Josh — are all accomplished writers and thinkers.
My own great-grandfather’s cousin — the journalist and exiled Russian Social-Democrat Jeffim Israel — escaped Vichy France with the help of the newspaper.
“The determined effort to exterminate us is not some ancient mythology; it’s not some lesson from deep in the history books,” Ossoff said in his Sunday speech. “It’s an experience of our families within whose living memory we were raised and which we still live.”
Nathan’s mother was Annie Ossoff’s sister, which means he was a first cousin of the future senator’s grandfather (and a first cousin twice removed from the senator himself). He was born in 1923 in Vilnius, Lithuania, according to testimony Nathan gave to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. The family was forced into a ghetto in 1941; two years later, Nathan and his father were sent to the camp, Erada and Narva.
“Nathan and 18 others broke away while on a forced march,” Ossoff said as he told the story. “They dig a deep bunker in the forest. They foraged for food, until eventually, Russian forces pushed the Germans out of this part of modern-day Estonia.
After being liberated by the Red Army in 1944, Nathan worked in a Soviet cotton mill for the duration of the war before returning to Communist Lithuania, according to his 1997 testimony. A Jewish organization later smuggled him into Germany. “They made papers, they were all with our names,” he said, “that we were Germans and were going back to Germany.”
Nathan placed the Forward ad with the help of the Jewish Labor Committee, a New York-based organization that helped Jewish refugees and European labor leaders during and after the Holocaust. The group regularly placed ads for survivors using their Forward Building office address. Annie had help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in securing a visa for him and his wife, Anna.
The Forward was the prime vehicle helping survivors find relatives in the United States. It was the largest Yiddish daily newspaper, and had bureaus and editions in every major Jewish community. In addition to running hundreds of ads per week, the Forward also read them aloud on its radio station, WEVD.
“If I did not connect with my aunt, Mrs. Ossof, I was going to go to Israel,” Nathan said in his testimony. “She and her sister were the only family I had left.”
For his visa, the Ossoffs guaranteed young Nochim a job at the family gas station on Peabody’s Main Street. When he arrived, though, he instead worked as a chemical mixer at a factory. Eventually, Nathan owned Samuel Smidt Chemical Corporation. A founding member of Peabody’s Temple Ner Tamid, he loved tennis, golf, paddleball and volleyball, according to his obituary, had four children and until his death in 2010 considered himself a “brother” to Senator Ossoff’s grandfather Hy.
Ossoff also spoke about Nathan last summer, in response to an antisemitic rally in Macon, Georgia. “I also tell you that story because Nathan’s only choice was to come to America,” he said, “Just as Israel and Annie, my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother, came to America seeking a place that promised tolerance and opportunity, regardless of faith, or race, or national origin.”
If Nathan’s story is ultimately an American immigration success story, it also shows the legal challenges refugees faced, and the role of legislators. More than three years passed between when Nathan’s ad appeared in the Forward and his arrival in the U.S.
The same year Nathan and Annie first made contact, 1946, President Harry S. Truman pushed for Congress to allow in more Jewish and other European refugees.
But conservative groups like the American Legion opposed the legislation, fearing a change to the country’s “racial composition,” according to the historian David Nasaw’s 2020 book The Last Million. A Gallup poll at the time showed 72% of Americans also opposed it.
Nasaw, whose 2020 book chronicles the plight of displaced persons like Nathan, said the opponents traded “in time-worn Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories,” suggesting that those who had lived under Soviet rule or were liberated by the Red Army “were more than likely to be Communist sympathizers or clandestine operatives.”
The DP Act finally passed in 1948. Nathan nonetheless had to conceal his time in the Soviet Union on his visa application and that he illegally crossed into the U.S. zone of Germany in early 1946.
“She picked me up at the train station from New York to Boston,” Nathan said of his aunt Annie Ossoff. They went from there to Peabody, where Annie and Israel’s eight children — Jon Ossoff’s grandfather and great-aunts and great-uncles — attended a welcome dinner.
“I’m a very lucky man,” Nathan said nearly 50 years later. “I lost my own family. But I’m accepted to my second family.”
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