Jeffrey Fajgenbaum honors his father Sidney Faye, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1925, to a middle-class family of watchmakers. When he was fourteen, the Nazis entered his house, and in front of him, killed his three sisters and mother. Over a six-year period, he was placed in thirteen different slave labor and concentration camps. He tried to flee several times, but was always caught and beaten. When he was liberated from Auschwitz, he weighed 90 pounds. After the war, he joined an American convoy heading towards Frankfurt, and was slowly brought back to health. Sponsored by his maternal grandfather and grandmother, he later moved to the United States, and began work in downtown Nashville as a watchmaker. Faye married and raised two sons; after a full life as a family man, mason, and military veteran, he died in 1988. In 2002, his son Jeffrey changed his last name from Faye to Fajgenbaum in order to honor his father’s memory.
The Nashville Holocaust Memorial