Bernie’s Mom & Dad
ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER
OUR COMMUNITY
WDIV sportscaster Bernie Smilovitz shares the story of his parents who survived the Holocaust.
Bernie Smilovitz, WDIV-TV sports director
ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
W
DIV-TV Sports Director Bernie Smilovitz is a go-to source for news about Detroit’s franchise sports teams and other professional sports. A winner of six local Emmys and six Best Sportscaster Awards, he’s known for the humor that informs his reporting and in his trademark “Bernie’s Bloopers” and “Weekend at Bernie’s” sports segments. Smilovitz was born in Brooklyn and raised in southeast Washington, D.C. With 36 years under his belt at WDIV, Bernie has become a Metro Detroit celebrity. Not many viewers are aware of his backstory, however, as a 2G — the child of Holocaust survivors. CHAIM (Children of Holocaust Survivors Association in Michigan) is a caring community for the second generation, “concerned with Holocaust education and remembrance, and combating prejudice and bigoty in all of its forms,” said CHAIM founder Dr. Charles Silow, the group’s co-president with Sandra Silver. When Bernie’s family connection to the Holocaust came to her attention, Silver asked him to share his mother’s and father’s stories. He agreed, then invited anchor Devin Scillian, his longtime friend and colleague, to interview him at the CHAIM program. “A Conversation with Bernie Smilovitz” attracted 95 par-
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ticipants on May 12 at the Zekelman Holocaust Center (HC) in Farmington Hills. BERNIE’S MOM’S STORY “For forever, our entire lives, my mother never wanted to talk to her sons about her Holocaust experiences,” Smilovitz said, echoing the experience in other 2G households. ‘“You don’t need to hear’” is what Rita (Mermelstein) Smilovitz typically told Bernie and his younger brother, Harvey. She and their father, Izidor “Izzy” Smilovitz, spoke Yiddish in the family’s one-bedroom apartment, and the brothers themselves became fluent. They were always hoping to overhear some detail from their tightlipped parents about what had happened to them during World War II. Everything changed when Zach Smilovitz, a son of Bernie and his clinical therapist wife, Dr. Donna Rockwell (Jake is their other son), joined his high school’s film club. Just 16 at the time, Zach decided his class project at Detroit Country Day School in Beverly Hills would be making a documentary about Rita and Izzy. To Bernie’s amazement, his parents were now eager to speak. They “opened the vault and told him everything,” Bernie said. Zach’s mature and heartfelt documentary, A is for Auschwitz: A Weekend with My Grandparents, is available for
viewing at the HC, on YouTube and in many schools around the country. Bernie’s mother, Rita, was born in 1925 in Czechoslovakia. She came from a large farm family of 11, also supported by her father’s general store. Rita was 15 when her mother died from typhus. At close to 18, Rita and other family members were put on what she called in the film: “an animal train to Auschwitz.” Young and healthy, Rita worked the next two years in the killing center’s crematorium, or as she described it: “the place where they put bodies in the chimney.” In the documentary, Rita shares many of the horrific moments she experienced, where “every morning, we were sleeping on dead people.” She knew the Nazi German officer and physician Josef Mengele, notorious for performing experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. One time while opening packages from a cargo train, she heard a baby’s cry. A guard holding a rifle to her head then made Rita throw the baby into the fiery oven. “She had to live with that,” Bernie said. Now he understood why “there were nights you heard her crying.” BERNIE’S DAD’S STORY Bernie’s father, Izzy, was born in 1915 in Hungary. Izzy’s father wanted him to be a rabbi. Izzy’s mother died a year after his bar mitzvah. When the Nazis invad-
Devin Scillian, WDIV anchor
CHAIM co-presidents Dr. Charles Silow and Sandra Silver
WDIV colleagues and friends Devin Scillian and Bernie Smilovitz before the program
