Joseph Nash, concentration camp survivor, dies

As a teenager, Joseph Nash survived Dachau and other World War II concentration camps because of acts of kindness from strangers.

After he emigrated to the United States and started his own business, Nash would often buy a meal for people who were down on their luck, his son Barry Nash said.

"He knew what it was like to be hungry," he said.

Nash died Thursday at age 86 of cancer at his St. Louis Park home.

He was born Joseph Nasielsky in a Polish border town. When he was 15, the Nazis sent him to a work camp, but he escaped.

"Dad had good timing," Barry Nash said. "When the firing squad was shooting, he fell and pretended he was dead." He climbed under a fence and made it back home.

Eventually, Nash was rounded up and sent to another work camp. His mother and his younger brother and sister were transported to the Warsaw ghetto.

Nash was moved from camp to camp, where they needed strong young men to work, and was ordered to carry bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium, his son said.

At the end of the war, the Nazis evacuated many concentration camps and forced prisoners such as Nash to undertake death marches across Germany. A German woman silently pushed a piece of bread under his clothing, and that food helped him survive until he was liberated by U.S. troops, Barry Nash said.

In 1949, Nash immigrated to the United States and lived in Massachusetts with his aunt. He became a citizen, and learned English at night school. "He called America the greatest country in the world because of the opportunities he had here," Barry said.

The Jewish Family Service found him a job in Minneapolis making seat covers for cars. He eventually learned a trade -- making caps -- when he worked at Northern Cap in Minneapolis. In 1955, Nash opened the J. Nash Cap Co. in downtown Minneapolis, where he designed and sewed hats, including baseball caps, hunting hats, ladies' hats and fur hats, which became his specialty. He filled custom orders for University of Minnesota professors and for local executives.

"He was a master at making expensive fur hats," said Mike Engel a longtime friend who was also in the hat manufacturing industry.

The hat-making business, which Nash operated for 43 years, became a family affair. His wife, Lenore, whom he married in 1951, did the ordering and billing, and Barry and his siblings helped fashion hats when they were old enough.

"I remember putting hats in a steamer and shaping them on a wooden block when I was 7," said Barry, of St. Louis Park.

Nash lost his lease in 1995 and moved the business to his home, eventually retiring because of health reasons.

Nash rarely dwelled on his past, and did not go along in 1978 when his son visited the Dachau Memorial Site.

"It was too emotional for him," Barry Nash said. "But he was empowered by talking about it, and was very proud of having survived."