Sigi Ziering memoir

Siegfried "Sigi" Ziering (1928-2000) was born in Kassel, Germany, the son of Isaac Ziering, a clothing merchant from Poland, and his wife Cilly. After the Nazis assumed power in Germany, Isaac left for England, with the expectation that his family would follow. Instead, Ziering, his mother, and brother, Hermann, were deported from Kassel in December 1941, and sent to Latvia, to the Riga Ghetto. Ziering remained in the ghetto until September 1943, when he was transferred to the Kaiserwald concentration camp near Riga, where he worked as a forced laborer assembling clothing for German troops. Subsequently he was evacuated to Libau (Liepaja), and then in February 1945 to Hamburg. In April 1945 he was marched with other prisoners from the Fuhlsbuettel concentration camp to Kiel. In May 1945, Ziering and a handful of other men managed to include themselves in a large group of Polish women who were released from German capitivity to the Red Cross and transported to Denmark and on to a refugee camp in Sweden. Ziering was reunited with his mother and brother, and subsequently with his father, and the family emigrated to the United States, settling in New York. Ziering earned a doctoral degree in physics from Syracuse University, and in 1971 founded his own company, Diagnostic Products Corporation in Los Angeles, which manufactured immunodiagnostic testing equipment. He was one of the founding donors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.