Bernie’s Mom & Dad

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Bernie’s Mom & Dad

WDIV sportscaster Bernie Smilovitz shares the story of his parents who survived the Holocaust.

ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

WDIV-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 participants 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-

ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER

Bernie Smilovitz, WDIV-TV sports director

Devin Scillian, WDIV anchor

CHAIM co-presidents Dr. Charles Silow and Sandra Silver

ed Poland in September 1939, “we had to go to the borders to fight back,” Izzy said.

Held four years in a slave labor camp, he recalled in the film being forced to cut trees that 30 or 40 people would then carry up the hill. After escaping with others, the group lived in the woods and did whatever was needed to survive as part of the Resistance. Years later, Izzy received a letter from the Hungarian government saying that it was granting him about $3,000 (the U.S. equivalent) “for the death of your family members during World War II.”

The documentary has gaps in the couple’s wartime history but includes what happened later. Rita and Izzy each reached New York City in the late 1940s and took factory jobs. They met at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Izzy’s brother told Rita, “He’s the nicest person. You should marry him.” And they were, until Izzy passed away 11 years ago.

When Rita died in December 2021, author and Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom, a family friend, wrote about the warmth, strength and humor of the 96-year-old woman. After introducing Rita to Mitch in 1997, Bernie explained to her that Albom was the writer of the bestselling book Tuesdays with Morrie about his visits with a cherished professor. Bernie agreed with Devin Scillian that his humorous ways could have come from his mother, who enlivened every gathering. Bernie said Rita “had no filter,” speaking English with some Yiddish mixed in, and “most of the time it was so funny.” An example from the Albom column: “If a restaurant served something she didn’t like, she’d crack: ‘The food was better in Auschwitz.’”

By contrast, Izzy was the family disciplinarian. Education came first with him. When Bernie’s fourthgrade report card included a “D” in typing, Izzy made him practice for hours.

From Bernie’s descriptions, the Smilovitzes seem to have adjusted pretty well to their new lives in America. Still, he remains convinced that “Holocaust survivors have a different vibe to them,” such as panicking when a family member comes late.

Rita once became frantic noticing her grandson Jake playing basketball outside. “She said that Germans might be in the bushes,” Bernie recalled. “She’d have little outbursts like this.”

Mostly, Rita was content to feed people her delicious cooking and lavish love on her family. It now includes a new grandchild for Bernie and Donna, who have three. Zach’s first child is named Isabel or Izzy, for Bernie’s father.

“There was hell,” Rita said about Auschwitz in the documentary, before pivoting abruptly to tell Zach and Bernie, “but now I have to make you French toast.”

At the conclusion of the program, CHAIM gave Scillian a copy of Invisible Ink, a book by Dr. Guy Stern, director of the HC’s Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous. Silver announced a donation to the museum to honor the memory of Bernie’s mother, Rita.

She said, “As our survivors age and pass, it is more important than ever to keep sharing a parent’s story, in hopes that the Holocaust doesn’t happen again.”

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part of the Soundstage Shaarey Zedek

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