Son of Holocaust Survivor Brings Family’s Story to Chestnut Ridge Middle School
 

For Immediate Release
March 10, 2025

Visitor Jeff Zeiger holds up a depiction of his father Shelley’s memoir, The Wheel of Life, alongside Chestnut Ridge Middle School teachers Michelle Schwiter (center) and Amanda Dacquisto.

WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP - Chestnut Ridge Middle School students welcomed Mr. Jeff Zeiger to the school on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. Mr. Zeiger is the son of a Holocaust survivor who told a story that balanced the horror of those dark and terrible times with the courage and bravery of an upstanding Ukrainian farmer who hid the Zeiger family for 27 months at great risk.

Jeff Zeiger told of his father’s family’s survival during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, when Shelley Zeiger, then 7 years old, his older brother, his parents, Sonya and Irving Zeiger, and two young unaccompanied girls from the village were hidden from the Nazi soldiers by a Christian farmer named Anton Suchinsky. Suchinsky, who was unable to read or write and who lived alone just outside of Zborov, in the Ukraine, worked with the family to dig out a bunker by using spoons and hid the Zeiger family and the two girls beneath the earth in a six-foot by eight-foot by four-foot hole.

Mr. Zeiger’s father, Shelley Zeiger, also tells the story through his memoir, The Wheel of Life, which takes readers through his experience as a child being rescued during the Holocaust, the family’s travels to reach the United States, and his life as an American citizen, serving in the army and later working in international business. The family even reunited with Mr. Suchinsky in the late 1980s, further able to thank him for what he did to help them survive.

- WTPS -