Dr. Felix Garfunkel, who survived the Soviet and Nazi invasions of Czernowitz, Romania, ghettos, concentration camps, and a death march, died this morning. He was 95.

Garfunkel received his medical training in Ecuador, one of the few nations to accept displaced Jews during World War II. He established the radiology department at Greene Memorial Hospital in Xenia and served as its director for 27 years. He retired from the Dayton VA in 2010.

He spoke to student groups and at Holocaust remembrance programs in his later years but chose not to detail the suffering he had endured.

“I had repeated, repeated traumas,” Garfunkel told The Observer in a 2015 interview. “We had terrible conditions. We were starved, we were emaciated, we were obviously going to die. They (the Nazis) wanted us to die. I knew all the two-and-a-half years before we were liberated — every moment — I knew that I was supposed to die, was going to die.”

Garfunkel’s mother and aunt found a way for the family to escape the Skazinets death camp. “There were sometimes peasants going through there on the outside of the barbed wire in their fields,” he explained. “And sometimes we can exchange a piece of clothing for some food. I don’t know what they gave them (the peasants), but they cut a hole in the barbed wire for us to escape and we got out there at night. And then we walked, hiding between the cornstalks for a long time, back to the city of Mogilev ghetto where we came from.”

He said his approach when he spoke in public was to emphasize “more of the triumph, the good, what you can do, and not dwell on the problem.”

Garfunkel added that he and his wife Erika, also a survivor (she died in 2020), didn’t talk with each other about their Holocaust experiences. They shared little more than bits and pieces with their children and grandchildren.

“I did not want to get the kids involved in those stories,” he said.

Their daughter, Rabbi Janice Garfunkel, who served Temple Sholom in Springfield from 2004 to 2010, died in 2013 following a long battle with breast cancer.

At the urging of his oldest son, Garfunkel wrote his memoir, From Czernowitz: A Life in Three Continents, which was published in 2015.

Garfunkel also documented his story in a 1981 video interview with Renate Frydman as part of Wright State University’s Faces Of The Holocaust series, and in 1993 for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Earlier this year, his portrait was included in photojournalist Madeleine Hordinski’s exhibit Holding Hope: Stories of Survival During the Holocaust at Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, under the auspices of the Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center.

The funeral will be held at 1 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 9 at Beth Jacob Cemetery Chapel, 4001 Old Troy, Pike, Dayton.

— Marshall Weiss