Bull
The purpose of all major religious traditions
is not to construct big temples on the outside,
but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside,
in our hearts.
– Tenzin Gyatso
Marginal Requirements
Retail I- According to a recent survey by Goldman Sachs of 2,000 U.S. consumers:
- The U.S. consumer continues to slowly, but steadily heal.
- Retail stocks catering to middle income households will outperform.
- Spending by “millennials” (ages 18-34) is poised to increase in 2014 and beyond.
Sounds like information you could have culled from a Target credit card. I’m just saying.
Marginal Musings
Retail II- Goldman’s report also states, “Our survey suggests continued employment gains are a key lever…(and) healthcare cost concerns may turn out to be overblown.” My guess is Sen. Ted Cruz won’t be appearing at any Goldman conferences this year.
Just Plain Marginal
Retail III- Goldman Sachs calls 2014 “The Year of the Paycheck” because they expect retail stocks like Target to outperform Tiffany. This is not to be confused with other cycles of the Goldman Zodiac, including “The Year of the Bentley,” “The Year of the Art Auction,” or “The Year of Sucking-It-Up.”
Views From the Cheap Seats
April 19, 1943 was the day before Adolf Hitler’s 54th birthday and as a present for their Fuhrer the Nazi’s decided to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto.
It was also the eve of Passover, and Bull, the nickname for 12-year old Irving Milchberg, a Jewish native of Warsaw who posed as a non-Jew outside the ghetto walls, had never missed a seder. Only one relative, an uncle, was still alive, and despite the imminent danger, Bull decided to return to the ghetto to spend Passover with what remained of his family. “It was in my blood,” he said.
Bull had already experienced much in his short life. Just a year earlier, he saw his father gunned down in the back by a Gestapo officer who found him hiding bread. Shortly thereafter Bull was seized in the street and put aboard a train headed for the Treblinka death camp. But during the night he managed to escape and returned to the ghetto. There he uncounted an empty apartment. His mother and three sisters had also been rounded up and put on that train.
Blessed with sandy hair and blue eyes, Bull was able to pass as a Polish gentile. Now orphaned, he took a series of jobs that allowed him to move between the Jewish ghetto and the outside world, including hustling cigarettes to Nazi soldiers, any of whom could have shot him on the spot if they discovered he was Jewish. The plucky street urchin would sometimes leave the ghetto by crawling through gutters under the walls, and return at night through a checkpoint manned by German guards, often smuggling guns in hollowed bread loaves. “I was small,” he said. “I had guts.”
With a basket of eggs and potatoes hidden under his arm, Bull entered the ghetto that Passover eve before the fighting started. Soon, soldiers and tanks and armored cars crossed the ghetto walls and started firing. The Jews, led by the Jewish Fighting Organization, fired back from rooftops with limited firearms and grenades. The ghetto started to burn.
Bull huddled into a crowded candlelit bunker. The building was shaking. People were crying. They didn’t want a seder. Bull’s uncle grabbed him by the ear. “Itzi,” he said, using Bull’s Yiddish nickname, “You may die, but if you die you’ll die as a Jew. If we live, we live as Jews. If you live, you’ll tell your children and grandchildren about this.”
The seder started. Uncle and nephew read the Haggadah together, from memory, in Hebrew. Soon, most of the others in the bunker joined in. “We did most of the prayers by heart,” said Bull. “The seder went very, very late.”
On the sixth day of the uprising, Bull was captured and put aboard a train to the Poniatowa concentration camp. But when the group was switched to another train, he mingled with a crowd of Polish boys selling water and escaped. In 1945, Bull made his way to Czechoslovakia, then Austria, then to a camp for displaced people in occupied Germany, where he learned watchmaking, his lifelong occupation. In 1947 he moved to Canada before finally settling in Niagara Falls, where he married, had children, and ran a successful souvenir shop. Bull died on Sunday at the age of 86.
Over the years, when asked if having a sedar in 1943 was worth the risk, Bull said, “Of course. I had many risks. To be alive was a risk.”
p.s. To learn more about the life of Irving Milchberg, read “The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square” by Joseph Ziemain.
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