Martin Stoger

Born:
Kraków, Poland
December 23, 1936

Martin Stoger was born into a well-to-do family in Kraków, where his father worked in the family’s wholesale materials business. After the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, all Jewish financial assets were frozen. The family moved from Kraków to the town of Tarnów where they lived with Martin’s paternal grandfather in the Jewish ghetto. After the ghetto was partially liquidated and Stoger’s grandfather was taken away by the police, Stoger’s mother secured false documents for herself and her son under the Polish name Savetsky. They moved to Warsaw where Martin’s mother hid the family’s Jewish identity in order to work as a seamstress and a bookkeeper at a construction firm. Meanwhile, Stoger’s father had fled for Italy and then Argentina where he waited for the rest of the family. In 1945 Soviet forces entered Poland, and Martin’s mother was arrested as a German spy. Fortunately she was released after only a few days and Martin and his mother made their way to Czechoslovakia to live with extended family. In October 1946 Stoger and his mother reunited with his father in Chicago where Martin entered the third grade in the local elementary school. Stoger graduated from the Chicago School of Business in 1963 and moved to Houston five years later.

Parents:
Hugo Stoger, survived
Sarna Landau Stoger, survived