Benno Fischer; Architect Survived Nazi Camps, Worked on Holocaust Museum

Benno Fischer, who survived Nazi forced labor camps and immigrated to Southern California to become an architect designing homes, churches and schools, has died. He was 86.

Fischer, who spent 15 years working with modernist architect Richard Neutra, died Sept. 15 of kidney failure at his West Los Angeles home.

The design of which he was proudest, said his daughter Tessa Fischer, was the Los Angeles Martyrs’ Memorial he created in 1978 for the American Jewish Federation building at 6505 Wilshire Blvd. The building has recently been redesigned, and she said the family hopes that parts of her father’s work will be incorporated into the planned Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

Fischer’s memorial was a tribute to his own past, as well as to that of other European Jews who suffered during the Holocaust.

Born in Poland, the son of a Jewish physician, Fischer graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1939. On Sept. 1 of that year, the Nazis overran Poland, and Fischer was sent to labor camps to make bomber aircraft, first near Mielec and later at Flossenburg in Bavaria.

He lived on a daily diet of watery soup and a single slice of bread in a guarded compound surrounded by electrified barbed wire. Letters designating him a prisoner were tattooed on his right wrist.

Fischer’s fellow prisoners were Dutch, French, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Greek and Turkish.

“When people are put under such conditions, differences in cultural background, nationality and religion simply vanish, and you can see that people are just people,” Fischer told The Times in 1967.

“This is why I refuse to specialize in architecture. I just work for people,” he said. “They have many different tastes and many different needs, but basically they are all the same.”

When the Nazis abandoned Flossenburg on April 14, 1945, they herded about 2,500 workers east on what became a 10-day death march--a trek that fewer than 80 survived.

“Behind every column of 50,” Fischer recalled with clarity decades after the event, “four SS men marched with machine guns and dogs. The snow was melting and the ditches were full of water. But if anyone stepped out of line to drink--’bing.’ ”

On April 23, the guards abandoned the surviving workers and fled. The next day, American troops rescued Fischer and the others. Fischer weighed only 80 pounds.

Sent to a displaced persons camp, Fischer learned that all the other members of his family had died at the hands of the Nazis. But miraculously, he caught up with a former girlfriend in suburban Stuttgart. She had survived by posing as an Aryan and using fake papers.

Her name was Anna Lipszyc. He married her.

In June 1946, the couple arrived in New York and Fischer soon went to work designing prefabricated homes for the General Panel Corp. Tired of eating apple pie and coffee--the only foods on a menu he could pronounce--he went to night school to learn English.

A few months later, the Fischers moved to Los Angeles, where he worked with Neutra.

In 1963, Fischer established his own architectural firm on Melrose Avenue. He enjoyed an eclectic practice, designing expensive homes in Beverly Hills, schools and churches, including San Dimas Community Church. He also helped create the Garden Grove Community Church, a forerunner of Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral that now serves as the glass church’s social hall.

Fischer is survived by his wife, Anna; another daughter, Karen Fischer, of Maui; a son, David, of Paris; and three grandchildren.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg SW, Washington, D.C. 20024-2126.