Pepi Deutsch; 101-Year-Old Auschwitz Survivor

Pepi Deutsch, a Hungarian Jew who along with her daughter survived the horrors of Auschwitz and then slave labor on the German front lines, has died at the age of 101.

Deutsch, who was believed to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Holocaust survivors in the United States, died Friday at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, a day after being admitted with bladder cancer.

“She was a giant among the people who walked the path of the Holocaust and survived,” said Richard Laster, chairman of the Holocaust commission in Westchester County.

At the outset of the war, Deutsch and her husband, Joseph Deutsch, owner of a shoe manufacturing business, were fairly prosperous members of the Jewish middle class in a small town in Transylvania.

In 1944, the 37 members of the extended Deutsch family were taken into custody by Hungarian Nazis. In June, just days after the Allied invasion of Europe, Pepi Deutsch, 44, and her daughter, Clara, 16, were put on a cattle car and sent to Auschwitz. Even though the Germans were gassing other women of Deutsch’s age, she was spared because of her youthful appearance.

“When they did the selections, we’d stand in different lines,” Deutsch’s daughter, now Clara Knopfler, told the Jewish Weekly some years ago. “You see, my mother and I looked very much alike, and the Nazis loved to separate mothers and daughters.”

Deutsch and her daughter were in Auschwitz only a short time before being assigned to a group of young women who could do hard labor. They were sent to Latvia, where they made gunpowder.

In the interview, Knopfler related their experiences in the forced labor brigade.

“We worked side by side, trying to survive,” Knopfler said. “Mamma supported me with understanding and love--she was even beaten by the SS when she tried to get an extra slice of bread for me.”

In September 1944, the women were sent to East Prussia to dig antitank trenches for the German army but were saved from the backbreaking work when they told the camp commander they knew how to repair shoes.

The following January they were liberated by the Russian army, but of the original 1,000 women in the labor force, only 150 were left alive. Deutsch weighed 90 pounds, about half her prewar weight.

“I didn’t think she would make it, she’d gotten so thin,” Knopfler recalled. After liberation, the two joined thousands of people clogging the roads as they made their way back to Transylvania. The trip was perilous, with Russian troops bent on rape and plunder, Knopfler said.

“I remember we were at the station in Treblinka waiting for a train and the Russians were looting outside,” Knopfler said. “One came in. . . . My mother literally sat on me, pulled a blanket around her and convinced the drunken soldier that she was too old for him. He took the woman next to her instead.”

It took six weeks for the women to get to their home. They found it had been plundered, with only a piano remaining. Of the 37 members of the Deutsch family imprisoned in 1944, they were the only survivors. Deutsch’s mother and four brothers had been killed. Her husband died at Auschwitz a week before liberation. Her son, a budding concert pianist, was shot by a camp guard when he complained that hard work was destroying his hands.

After the war, Clara married Paul Knopfler, who had lost his entire family in the Holocaust. They settled in Romania and she earned her teaching degree. They were able to immigrate to France in 1962 and to the United States the next year.

But the family tragedies did not end with immigration. Paul Knopfler made a good living as a chemist but was killed in an industrial accident in 1991.

Knopfler lived with her mother for the rest of Deutsch’s life.

“My mother had tremendous faith. She even fasted on Yom Kippur in the camps,” Knopfler said. “When I asked her [in the camps] where her God was now, she’d tell me that it wasn’t God doing this, it was man.”