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Simon Samuel Spritzman (Chișinău, April 24, 1904 – Parma, June 13, 1982) was a Russian-born engineer, naturalized American, of Jewish faith, and a Holocaust survivor.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Samuel Spritzman was born in Chișinău, then part of the Russian Empire, on 24 April 1904, to Elia Spritzman, a physician, and Adelaide Faiman. The family belonged to the Jewish bourgeoisie, a common circumstance in a city where, according to the last census of 1897, Jews numbered more than 50,000 (around 46% of the urban population) and where much of the trade and emerging local industry was controlled by Jewish entrepreneurs. Within a few years, the city was also to become an important centre of Jewish publishing. The Jewish population of Chișinău had steadily increased throughout the previous century, driven by the economic development of the capital of Bessarabia and by rising antisemitism in Russia and Poland. By the time of Samuel’s birth, however, antisemitism had also taken root in Chișinău itself. Years of antisemitic propaganda by an ultra-nationalist local newspaper culminated in the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the year before Samuel’s birth, which resulted in 49 deaths and widespread destruction and looting, drawing international attention. In 1905 similar violence erupted again, with fewer victims (19) thanks to the creation of Jewish self-defence groups.
Following the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the occupation of the region by Romanian troops, in April 1918 the whole of Bessarabia was annexed by the Kingdom of Romania. During this period, Spritzman attended a Russian-language classical high school. Meanwhile, the Jewish population in Chișinău experienced renewed demographic growth due to the influx of refugees fleeing the pogroms occurring in the Ukrainian People's Republic during the Russian Civil War. Jews, however, were subject to recurring discrimination in Romania too: because of his religion Spritzman was denied admission to several universities in the region. Since he had relatives living in Parma, he decided to move to Italy, enrolling in the faculty of Engineering: first for two years at the University of Parma and then for three years at the University of Turin. After completing his studies, Spritzman began working for RIV, a mechanical engineering company within the FIAT orbit (the ownership was partially held by Giovanni Agnelli), based in Villar Perosa. He became head of the office responsible for relations with the Soviet Union and took part to the activities connected with the contracts obtained by the Turin-based group in the USSR. In 1930 he transferred directly to FIAT, and in 1937 he moved to Milan to work for another company in the Fiat Group, Magneti Marelli.
Persecution
The persecution of rights
On 5 September 1938, the first decree of what would become known as the Italian racial laws was issued. Two days later, on 7 September, a further decree introduced provisions against foreign Jews, who thus became among the very first groups to be targeted. This decree required foreign Jews (including Italian Jews naturalised after 1919, who were simultaneously stripped of their citizenship) to leave Italy by 12 March 1939. Although this mass expulsion was later suspended due to its practical impossibility, given the widespread barriers to Jewish immigration imposed by other countries, the deadline remained significant as the moment from which foreign Jews were banned from working in Italy.
Spritzman was therefore dismissed from Magneti Marelli on 5 April 1939 and forced to return to Turin, where he was officially resident. In the same year, he became stateless following an antisemitic turn in Romania under the Goga government, which enacted a series of antisemitic laws. Among these laws, there was a provision requiring Jews naturalised after 1918 to reapply for citizenship within 20 days of the law’s publication and to prove that they had not immigrated to Romania after that date. These laws affected a large proportion of Romanian Jews (most of whom lived in territories annexed after the First World War, such as Transylvania, Banat and Bessarabia) and between 1938 and 1939 it resulted in the revocation of Romanian citizenship from around 30% of Romanian Jews who, for various reasons, were unable to submit the required documentation within the extremely short time frame.
With Italy’s entry in World War II, antisemitic persecution intensified further. On 15 June 1940, internment was ordered not only for military-age citizens of enemy states, whether Jewish or not, but also for foreign Jews "belonging to states that pursue racial policies" (namely Nazi Germany and the territories it had conquered, such as Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) as well as for stateless persons. Mass arrests followed, targeting the majority of foreign Jewish men, who were initially taken to local prisons and later transferred to internment camps. Women and children were also interned (and family reunification was allowed only in some cases). Some internees were assigned to so-called "free internment", a form of internal exile involving compulsory residence in a specific locality and severe restrictions on personal freedom, including curfews and bans on radios, foreign newspapers, and hosting relatives. State subsidies (8 lire per day for heads of households and 4 lire for other family members, plus 50 lire per month for housing) were insufficient, forcing internees into conditions of extreme poverty. As a stateless person, Spritzman was arrested in June 1940 while in Parma. After initial detention in local prisons, he was assigned in July 1940 to free internment in Nepi, in the province of Viterbo.
Meanwhile, Bessarabia had become Soviet territory following the Soviet occupation of the region in June–July 1940, agreed upon with Germany under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet embassy was therefore able to intervene in Spritzman’s case and exert pressure for his release, on the grounds that he had become a citizen of a neutral country. This was achieved in April 1941, when he was also granted Soviet citizenship for six months and employed by the embassy’s press office.
This period of freedom lasted only a few months. On 22 June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and Italy and Romania declared war to the USSR on the same day. Spritzman attempted to hide inside the embassy but was arrested by the OVRA on 27 June and imprisoned at Regina Coeli in Rome for a month. In July, he was interned in the Corropoli camp, in the province of Teramo, where the majority of prisoners was composed by Italian and Yugoslav political prisoners. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and internees were allowed only minimal movement under strict surveillance. Spritzman's health deteriorated there, and he underwent surgery. The Vatican Secretariat of State intervened on his behalf, eventually securing his return to free internment in March 1942. He was transferred to Parma, where he lived under police supervision but could at least rely on assistance from relatives, including his aunt Riwka Spritzman and her husband Ferruccio Candian.
The persecution of lifes
After 8 September 1943, Spritzman was sought by the Germans, arrested and again imprisoned in Parma. On 18 November he was transferred to Scipione Castle near Salsomaggiore Terme, where he was interrogated by the SS on suspicion of being an NKVD agent. The Germans also made him an offer to collaborate as a technician, possibly due to his linguistic skills, but he categorically refused, declaring that he would attempt acts of sabotage if forced to cooperate. On 22 February he was transferred to Bologna, to the San Giovanni in Monte prison under Gestapo control, where he was subjected to severe torture. On 29 April he was moved again, this time to Verona, to the forts of San Leonardo and San Mattia, which were used as German-run prisons. There he was forced to perform hard labor consisting in recovering unexploded bombs in the areas around Verona, Mantua and Cremona. He was subsequently transferred to the Bolzano Transit Camp and then to its subcamps in Merano and Certosa, both used for forced labour related to the transport of goods seized by the Germans in Italy. After a brief return to Bolzano, he was deported on transport number 18 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, arriving on 28 October 1944 after a four-day journey. Another known deportee on the same transport was Piera Sonnino, later an important witness to the Italian Shoah.
Spritzman was assigned to BIId, the men’s camp, and put to manual labour, receiving prisoner number B-13735. Later accused of sabotaging machine guns together with Russian prisoners, he was transferred to the notorious Block 11 of Auschwitz I, the camp prison, known among inmates as the "death block" because of its extremely high mortality rate. Despite this, Spritzman survived and remained there until December 1944. At that time, mass killings in the gas chambers had already been halted and some chambers were being dismantled, although the complete evacuation of the camp and the death marches had not yet begun. Spritzman was transferred, via the prison in Breslau, to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where he received a new prisoner number, J-91639. From there he was sent to the Landeshut subcamp (in the present-day Kamienna Góra) in Lower Silesia, first working in a ball-bearing factory and later forced to dig defensive trenches until 9 May 1945, when he was finally liberated by Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front.
Return and post-war years
After liberation, Spritzman joined a group of Italian civilian workers (former Italian Military Internees) and, travelling through Iglau and Brno in Czechoslovakia and via Vác in Hungary, reached Budapest at the end of May 1945. By falsifying his nationality and with the help of Zionist organisations and former deportees, he was eventually repatriated to Italy by the Red Cross, arriving in Milan in August 1945 and returning to Parma shortly thereafter. In November 1945 he was officially recognised as a political persecuted person, thanks in part to the intervention of Giacomo Ferrari, then Prefect of Parma. From the first months after his return, he began collecting documentation relating to his persecution, an activity he would continue in later years.
He later formed a partnership with the widow of his cousin, Ada Tedeschi, who was also a Jew. The couple moved to the United States, as Spritzman obtained a job there in 1951. In 1956, he became an American citizen. Spritzman and Tedeschi married in 1969. After retiring in 1973, the couple returned to Parma, where they reunited with surviving relatives (Samuel's aunt, Riwka, had survived the war and was still living in the city). After years of illness resulting from his time in the camps, Samuel Spritzman died in Parma on 13 June 1982, aged 78, at his home on Via Mascagni. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery of Parma.
Remembrance
The extensive research and documentation of his own persecution, which Spritzman began shortly after returning to Italy in 1945, has contributed to the historical significance of his story. In the 1990s, his wife Ada Tedeschi donated the collected documents to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. During the same period, she also donated personal items belonging to her husband (including his striped cap, a coat, the yellow star, and tools used during imprisonment) to the Fausto Levi Jewish Museum in Soragna.
In 2006, as part of Holocaust memorial day commemorations, the Jewish Museum of Bologna organised a monographic exhibition titled Samuele Simone Spritzman. Un ebreo sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz. Da Kishinev a Parma, held between January and February of that year. The research conducted for the exhibition resulted in a monograph of the same title.
On 6 February 2019, a Stolperstein was laid in Parma in front of the site of Villa Candian, where Spritzman lived under free internment between 1942 and 1943.