Open Book!
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Names Not Numbers
Martin Bloch
Martin Bloch
Martin was born on December 26, 1935, in Ivie, Poland, which is now part of Belarus. His ancestors hailed from Alsace-Lorraine and later migrated to Lithuania. He was the son of Sonia (née Zlotnick) and Joshua Bloch. Martin had one sibling, his older brother Sam E. Bloch. Sam became a resistance fighter in Belarus during the Holocaust and played an influential role in Holocaust remembrance and Zionist leadership.
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Sam served as the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council’s Board of Advisors, the Director of Publications for the World Zionist Organization, and was the author of From Holocaust to Redemption: Bearing Witness. Martin’s father, Joshua, was an educator and director of a gymnasium, which was a combined high school and two-year college, while his mother was a businesswoman who owned two clothing shops and traded in currency.
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Martin’s early schooling was unconventional, as he began his education informally as part of the Bielski Partisans, a Jewish resistance group. After the war, he resumed formal education in a displaced-persons camp at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Later, Martin attended Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, New York, and majored in electrical engineering and physics at City College of New York (CCNY).
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The invasion of Poland in June 1941 changed Martin’s life forever. His father was taken, along with 200 other members of the intelligentsia, under the pretense of being sent to work, but he was executed behind a church and buried in a mass grave. Martin was just five and a half years old when this happened. His family was forced into a small ghetto, but his mother refused to believe they would be spared.
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In early December 1942, they escaped under a barbed wire fence. They sought refuge with a Christian family, who hid them for a time, along with a dozen other Jews.
Through a local farmer, Martin’s mother learned about a well-established Jewish partisan group of freedom fighters who resisted the Nazis through sabotage and guerrilla warfare named the Bielski Partisans.
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Their story was depicted in the 2008 movie Defiance (Martin’s brother, Sam, helped with the script). The family traveled 150 miles and lived in the woods for months while searching for the group. Once they found the partisans, Martin, his mother, and his brother remained with them until the end of the war.
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After the war, in 1945, the family returned to their hometown of Ivie, Poland, but found their house occupied and encountered rampant antisemitism. They relocated to British-occupied Berlin, where they lived in a displaced-persons camp at the former site of Bergen-Belsen. Martin, now in his early teens, began formal education in the camp and developed a strong interest in math and physics, though he often skipped English classes.
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Skipping those classes was something that later posed a challenge when he arrived in America.
In 1951, Martin and his family immigrated to the United States. Although his brother initially wanted to go to British-controlled Palestine, he ultimately followed his fiancée to the U.S., bringing the entire family to New York. Upon arrival, they stayed in a refugee camp set up in Cooper Union before eventually securing an apartment in the Bronx.
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Martin attended Roosevelt High School for one and a half years and then pursued his passion for electrical engineering and physics at CCNY.
During college, Martin secured an internship at the Weizmann Institute, where he assisted with research tasks and even delivered documents between the Institute and Princeton, occasionally helping Albert Einstein in his capacity as an advisor to the Weizmann Institute.
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After graduating from CCNY in 1956, Martin worked for the Bolivar Watch Company, where he created their first electronics division. In 1961, he left Bolivar to start his own company, Frequency Electronics, a company he led until he stepped down. Today, Martin remains a consultant for the space program, the Department of Defense, and private companies.
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He has earned the title of “Timekeeper of Outer Space” for his contributions to precision time-keeping technologies.
Martin’s mother passed away in 2000 at the age of 101, and his brother Sam died in 2018 at the age of 99. Before Sam’s death, Martin promised him that he would continue his work in Holocaust remembrance and education. Martin now travels giving Holocause presentations and lectures.
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He has given 36 Holocaust lectures in the last two years across the country, including to an audience of 1,000 scientists in Washington, D.C. His most recent presentation was to 1,500 people at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan.
Martin has three children: one son, who works in investments and previously worked for Frequency Electronics, and two daughters—one who is a physician at Long Island Jewish Hospital and another who is a student.
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The End
Martin Bloch interview at Roslyn High School - 2023-2024
Roslyn High School
