TOLEDO, Ohio — Dr. Allen Markowicz is a father, grandfather and husband. He's a retired physician and professor of medicine at the University of Toledo.
But the story of his parents started about a century ago.
Philip Markowicz and Ruth Fajerman were born in Poland in the 1920s.
"As the Nazis conquered these countries, people from those countries willingly participated and joined the killing machines," Allen said.
Their lives were shattered when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Both were taken to separate concentration camps; Ruth offered to take the place of her parents.
"[Ruth] volunteered to work in their stead, thinking that they would survive in the ghetto," Allen said. "Ironically, they got killed by being in the ghetto as the ghetto was liquidated and she survived as a slave laborer."
Philip and his brother, Henry Markowicz, also found themselves working to stay alive. Allen says his father and uncle knew they had to do something to avoid being gassed and cremated.
"Even though they weren't chosen to work, they snuck onto work detail and were taken out to other concentration camps to work," Allen said.
Philip and Henry stayed together throughout the war and the Holocaust and hid their sibling relationship, Allen said.
"At the beginning, we knew that they were Holocaust survivors. We knew they had been in concentration camps. We didn't know the details as children. But as we got older, more and more things, came into focus about their lives," Allen said. "Ultimately, the most important thing was my dad, when he retired, wrote his autobiography, 'My Three Lives.'"
In the novel, Philip explains how he and his brother survived the ghetto of Lodz, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, as well as a death march. The Holocaust and the Nazis claimed the lives of the rest of his family.
"While there have been other genocides and even continued to be other genocides, the Holocaust is unique, not just in its size and scope. Six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were killed," Allen said.
He added, "It was not against combatants. It occurred on both sides of the fighting. In other words, as the Nazis conquered other countries, they singled out the Jews for killing. They were particularly targeting children. They had industrial-size methods of killing factories of death ... Those who weren't immediately killed were used as slave laborers."
Philip was eventually liberated by Allied forces. Ruth was saved by the Russians and made her way to Allied territory following the end of WWII.
By that time, Allen said his father weighed only 87 pounds, extremely malnourished for an adult man standing at 5 feet, 10 inches tall.
"After the war, we spent two months in the hospital, "Allen said of his father. "He had gotten tuberculosis during the war."
Philip and Ruth met and later became the first to be married in one of the camps for displaced people.
"The liberation was in May," Allen said. "In November, they got married."
Allen explains the family moved to the United States in the years following the war. They found cousins in Toledo, got sponsored and Philip found work. He started in a factory and got a second job installing axles at the Toledo Jeep Plant. Then, he found a love for television repair when a repairman came to service the family's television set, learning the trade and eventually opening his own shop in west Toledo.
"My father was always known as a person who can fix anything. My uncle said he was known as the man with the golden hands," Allen said. "He saw that contrast between factory work and fixing TVs with this guy dressed up nicely, little toolkit and he had confidence in himself that he could learn."
Phil's TV & Appliance stood at 3141 W. Sylvania Ave. for decades. The namesake Markowicz would eventually sell the business in 1987. It remained open until 2012.
"He studied these technical books," Allen said. "I remember those that time sitting in the park with him studying. He took a night job cleaning up in a TV store. He started asking people to send them any radios that others couldn't repair."
Allen said his dad would work out of the basement to fix those otherwise unrepairable items.
"To make a long story short, that became Phil's TV first out of our basement, " Allen said.
Ruth Markowicz died in 2004 from complications of illness linked to her slave labor during the Holocaust.
"She actually caught rheumatic fever in in the work camp and kept working through it. Ultimately, that led to her death at an elderly age here in the country because she developed traumatic heart disease, atrial fibrillation and strokes from that," Allen said.
Philip lived to be 93. He died in 2017.
The legacies of Allen's parents still live on, though.
The Ruth Markowicz Holocaust Resource Center of Greater Toledo is named after Allen's mother. Philip spoke on the Holocaust and Torah at various universities, secondary schools, religious institutions, seminars and other media and venues. The Philip Markowicz Annual Lecture in Judaism and Jewish Biblical Students Supported by the Jewish Federation and Foundation of Greater Toledo continues each year.
For Allen, his parents' lasting message is one of great importance. It's a message he says needs to be shared so history doesn't repeat itself.
"It wasn't done in some faraway corner of the globe by some primitive people. It was perpetrated by Germany, which was arguably the leading country of civilization at that time if you look at science, philosophy, medicine and literature," Allen said. "It was planned not just by mobs of people, but by men with doctor's degrees and PhDs."
Allen said he continues to see the hatred for Jewish people decades later and cautions that the reality of the Holocaust should serve as a warning.
"We can see it now in the news. We see anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head, something in the United States we thought was finished in the mid-60s," Allen said. "The Holocaust is an example of what can happen if that's left unchecked."