Nat Shaffir (Nathan Spitzer)

Nathan Spitzer (now Nat Shaffir) was born on December 26, 1936, in Iaşi, Romania, to Anton and Fany Spitzer. In 1924 Anton and his two older brothers moved from the region of Transylvania to Bucium, a village near Iaşi where they established a dairy farm. In 1930 Anton went back to Transylvania to find a bride. In 1931, Anton and his new bride came back to the farm. The family owned a large dairy farm that supplied dairy products to the Romanian army. The Spitzers’ farm prospered, with many head of cattle. Fany managed the household and raised Nat and his two sisters, Sara and Lili. 

Romania became an ally of Nazi Germany in November 1940. Although some antisemitic laws and violence that predated this alliance, antisemitism in Romania increased in the months that followed. Romania joined Nazi Germany in the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and perpetrated a number of atrocities against Jews in Iaşi and Romanian-occupied territory. 

One day in November 1942, Romanian authorities arrived at the farm with a priest who identified the family as Jews. The Spitzers’ farm and all the cattle were confiscated. The family had four hours to pack up their belongings and were allowed to take only one horse and one wagon. They moved into the Socola neighborhood of Iaşi. Nat and his sisters were no longer allowed to attend public school.

In June 1943, Romanian military authorities took Nat’s father and other able-bodied men from Iaşi to perform forced labor laying new railroad tracks in occupied Ukraine. Iaşi fell to the Soviet Army in August 1944 but Anton would not be liberated and able to return until the spring of 1945. By that time, all of the Spitzers’ extended family, who had remained in Transylvania when it was taken over by Hungary, had been killed. Fany’s father Eliyahu Aryeh Wax and eleven of Fanny’s siblings had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center by Hungarian gendarmerie in complicity with the Germans. (Her mother had died years earlier in childbirth.) Eliyahu later died of starvation in a subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one month before the camp was evacuated. Only two of Fany’s brothers, Moshe and Lazar Wax, survived until their liberation. Moshe died shortly after while on board a ship heading to a sanatorium in Sweden; Lazar later immigrated to the United States.

After the Communists seized power in Romania, the Spitzer children were ridiculed by their gentile classmates and excluded from Communist student groups. It became evident to Anton that continued antisemitism and discrimination provided an unsafe future for his family. In 1947, Anton and Fany decided to leave Romania for British-controlled Mandatory Palestine, but their application for an exit permit was repeatedly denied. Eventually Fany bribed local officials to secure passage to Israel. The Spitzer family left Romania in March 1950 on board a cargo ship called the Transylvania and arrived in the port of Haifa in April just before Passover of that year.

While in Israel, Nat served for three years in the Israeli army. In 1961, he moved to the United States and in 1969 started his own business. He married Merryl Rich of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1970. They have five children and 12 grandchildren and live in Maryland, and Nat is a volunteer with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.