IF YOU WILL IT IS NO DREAM

I am indebted to Joshua M. Greene on whose fascinating biography of a “superman” called “Unstoppable”, I based the following blogs:

                                                                                 

The story of Siggy Wilzig is incredible. He arrived in America with no resources or credentials. He spoke with a thick German accent, had only an elementary school education, stood five feet five and a half inches short, and years of torture and starvation were still fresh in his mind. However, he made three promises to himself: never to go hungry again; marry a Jewish woman, have children, and help rebuild the Jewish people; preserve Holocaust memory and speak up whenever he witnessed injustice.

Siggy was the only survivor in his family, of Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Mathausen. He came to America poor and uneducated, and rose from cleaning sweatshop toilets to becoming CEO of a New York Stock Exchange; a listed oil company; and a multibillion-dollar commercial bank. That he did so in two of postwar America’s most anti-Semitic industries makes his achievements even more amazing.  

In the early 1950s, fifty seven anti-Semitic groups openly operated in the US and were publishing hate sheets. Jews were kept from the higher circles of power  and from living in the choicest neighbourhoods. The more “tolerant” version of anti-semitism acknowledged Jews while limiting their full participation in law, medicine, oil and gas, commercial banking and other industries. Antisemites were everywhere, ready to take any steps necessary to keep an ambitious refugee in his place.

From cleaning toilets, the number of job experiences that Siggi acquired was varied and upgrading. He had worked in both leather goods and bowtie sweatshops, sold neckties and loose leaf binders door to door, manufactured change purses, revamped a furniture business,  managed a cemetery headstone company, bought and sold a tire company and an electronics distribution company, revitalized an oil- and gas-producing company – and retained every detail in the database of his extraordinary memory.

A man who never took high school math, he taught himself a vast range of specialized fields of knowledge: the commodities market, the currency market, the stock market, the bond market and global economics, as well as corporate law, corporate taxes, corporate accounting, etc. 

The words “unforgettable”, “volcano”, “genius” are some of the superlatives of everyone who had any contact with him. While others called him “an irresistible force of nature” and “the most brilliant man I’ve ever met”. Each astonishing, frequently hilarious, occasionally shocking story, contributed to the portrait of a complex man for whom the value of life was found in dreaming impossible dreams, and fighting unbeatable foes. Only one description meant more to him than all others combined: a Holocaust survivor.

He excelled in telling tall stories, getting away with the most outrageous claims. If he saw someone riding a horse he’d yell out: “Sit straight! Pull in the reins! Loosen the horse up before you gallop!” Although he never rode a horse in his life, he sounded so sure of what he was saying, the rider would say: “Thank you!” and my father would reply, “No problem. I’ll make a rider out of you one day – no matter how long it takes!” Why did he have such an extreme sense of humour? Because he went through the most evil time in history,” his son explained. “He followed the line of great Jewish comedians who countered tragedy with humour to help heal the wounds”.

To combat nightmares of Auschwitz, Siggi became the worst kind of workaholic - the kind for whom the only cure was more work. This meant working at maximum speed and maximum volume. He never just talked on a phone. He walked and yelled while secretaries followed, holding the cord above their heads. He communicated with his whole body with a voice that boomed like a cannon.

Erratic behaviour from him was the privilege of a man whom the SS had failed to destroy, “Every day I’m alive,” he would frequently say, “is another day Hitler didn’t kill me.” And if Hitler had failed to kill him, what chance did the Federal Reserve have? [The U.S. central banking system, the FED is the most powerful economic institution, not only in the U.S., but most probably in the world].

His ongoing battle with the FED is a story unto itself.