Holocaust and hurricane survivor who tailored for Elvis

Born: November 27, 1915;

Died: March 24, 2016

JOSEPH Sher, a Polish Jew, survived the Holocaust, reached New Orleans after the war, made costumes for a young Elvis Presley, was rescued from his flooded home at the age of 89 during Hurricane Katrina and lived to be 100. He often said he owed his life to "a needle and thread," since the Nazis had spared him because of his skills as a tailor. Sher's parents and his three sisters all died in the Treblinka extermination camp while he and his two brothers survived.

Once in New Orleans, in addition to tailoring some of Elvis's first "jump suits," Sher made costumes for Chubby Checker, who launched "the Twist" craze, and famous New Orleanian musicians Fats Domino.

Jozef Scher, as it his name spelt then, was born on 27 November 1915 in Krzepice, Poland, at the time a town with a 43 percent Jewish population. One of three sons and three daughters of Simon and Felicia Scher, he had suffered growing anti-semitism at school before the family moved to the nearby town of Czestochowa. Joseph, nicknamed "Zaydie," was 23 and had followed his father into tailoring when several hundred German Panzer tanks invaded Poland on 1 September, effectively starting the Second World War. Krzepice and Czestochowa were the first towns taken and the first thing the Nazis did was to cordon off the Jewish quarters as ghettos.

According to Sher's memoirs, the Germans ordered every Jewish male between 15 and 80 to assemble in the market square of Czestochowa before shooting one in every 12 men to instil fear. They then picked out able-bodied males to work in labour camps, mostly building roads for the Nazi war machine on the Eastern front. Others were sent by cattle train to concentration camps including Treblinka and Auschwitz.

"They took us railway cattle cars to Lublin province and on to Cieszanow to build a highway," Sher wrote in his memoirs. "Out of the 1,000 men from Czestochowa who went there, only three survived. I am one of the three."

While he was in a labour camp near Treblinka, two German Jews helped win Sher's freedom, citing his usefulness as a tailor to repair Nazi uniforms. He returned home to still-occupied Czestochowa but was found to have contracted typhus in the camp. His remaining family hid him behind a wall and cared for him for a month, during which his grandmother was killed by the Nazis in front of the family building. Sher survived, as did his two brothers. The eldest brother Leo had been spared because he had taken care of the dog of the local Gestapo chief, a childless couple to whom their dog was like a child.

Before being rounded up by the Nazis, Joseph Sher had married his sweetheart and fellow Jew Rachel Israelowicz. She too was sent to a Nazi labour camp, but survived and would eventually get to New Orleans with her husband via post-war Displacement Persons' camps.

At six am on the day after the couple arrived in New Orleans, Joseph Sher went to work in the city's famous tailors', Harry Hyman, where he would work - 12 hours a day - for 40 years.

It was there, in early 1958, that he met the young Elvis Presley, in town to make the movie King Creole. The 23-year-old Elvis came to the shop after hours, protected by bodyguards because he was being chased everywhere by fans. Sher had seen Elvis on the famous US TV Ed Sullivan show but was unaware of how famous he was. He made the singer several personal suits, including one which would spark the idea of the type of "jump-suit" Elvis would later wear on stage.

Having retired, and as a widower (his wife Rachel died in 1997), Sher was coming up 90, alone in a shared house in New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. The initial hurricane did not affect him but a few days later the city's levees (flood protections) broke and flood waters cut off his house.

At 89 years old, he could not wade through the neck-high water but a younger neighbour, Juan Parke, found a one-man skiff floating in a garden and rowed Sher and three other tenants to safety. "I'd be damned if I'd let this storm do what the Nazis couldn't," Sher said later. "Katrina was a piece of cake compared to the Holocaust."

Joseph Sher is survived by his sons Martin and Leopold and grandchildren Rose, Samantha and Jay.

PHIL DAVISON