Imagine what it must have been like to be born in 1944 in Poland, with war raging throughout Europe. To know that the only chance for survival was for your parents to move from city to city to escape the horrors of war, hopeful of avoiding capture and being sent to a Nazi death camp.
These were the bleak conditions that characterized the environment for Eli and Luba Maschler when they gave birth to their son, Sheldon (Shelly) Maschler, in 1944. Despite overwhelming odds, Eli, Luba, and Shelly survived and lived in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany by the war’s end. Shortly after Shelly’s brother Ed was born in 1947, the young but weary couple and their two sons embarked in Hamburg for the long journey to America, hopeful of connecting with Eli’s brother Joe, who was living in Brooklyn, New York.
When the docks on the west side of Manhattan came into view, the family’s hopes for a new beginning in a better world seemed almost too good to be true. Eli was able to reconnect with Joe, and for the next five years, the family found work wherever they could, even on a chicken farm in Belmar, New Jersey.
After Eli died unexpectedly in 1952, Luba moved back to Brooklyn. Raising two young boys in the city fell on Luba’s shoulders, but she made ends meet by doing factory work and successfully training to become a beautician. As the oldest brother, Shelly quickly became the man of the house, ever aware that life in the streets of Brooklyn in the ’50s was a formidable and often dangerous challenge.
Shelly found the classroom too confining, preferring the streets as an engaging way to satisfy his interests in sports like handball and pool, where he could play the angles and beat the odds. At the same time, he wasn’t averse to work, and after the school day ended, he headed to May’s Department Store, where he was paid $1.00 an hour.
Despite the city’s distractions and with much pushing and cajoling from his mother, Shelly and his brother stayed in school (P.S. 189 and Winthrop Junior High) and ultimately graduated from Wingate High School.
