★★★★★ 5
An Amazing Story of "Rags-to-Riches" and the "American Dream" at its Best
Format: Hardcover
While it is fashionable in some circles today to believe that achieving the “American Dream” of health, wealth and happiness is no longer possible, "Unstoppable" proves the contrary. Siggi Wilzig’s “rags to riches” story is all the more amazing because he came to the United States in 1947 at the age of 21 with $240 in his pocket and then began his new life as a poor immigrant shoveling snow, cleaning toilets, and selling household goods as a travelling salesman. When one considers that Siggi had already survived torture and starvation at the hands of SS guards in Auschwitz, what he was able to achieve before his death in 2003 truly deserves to be called an “astonishing journey.”
Sigi got his opportunity to achieve his American Dream in the mid-1950s, when Sol Diamond, a prominent entrepreneur in then his late 70s, sensed that his much younger friend was the right person to take control of a struggling Texas oil company in which both Diamond and Sigi owned stock. By 1964, Sigi and a small group of friends and family had accumulated enough stock in the Wilshire Oil Company of Texas to get two seats on the company’s board of directors. A year later, Sigi was the president and chief executive officer of the company as well as the chairman of the board.
By the late 1960s, Sigi had also taken over a commercial bank—the Trust Company of New Jersey—and was its chief executive officer and chairman of the board. By the early 1990s, the bank’s assets had grown from $180 million to more than $2.2 billion and it was considered the “healthiest bank” in New Jersey.
Despite never having finished junior high school, Sigi Wilzig had the instincts and drive to become a phenomenal business success—and a bigger-than-life personality in the American Jewish community. He was a world-class story-teller comedian and charmer and these character traits also were very important to his success. But when talking about his achievements, Sigi insisted that he could not have become a business success anywhere else in the world. “Only in America is such a miracle possible. Only America is the land of freedom and opportunity.” Whether this is a true statement is not the point. Rather, Sigi believed it to be true and he acted accordingly.
While Sigi certainly enjoyed financial success, he never forgot his early years in Auschwitz and this explains why his own motto for life was: “Free Men Who Forget Their Bitter Past Do Not Deserve a Bright Future.” That said, Sigi loved his fellow human beings and had great empathy for them.
Author Joshua Greene, an accomplished scholar of the Holocaust whose books have sold more than 500,000 copies, brings Sigi to life in the pages of this superb biography. Unstoppable is an inspiring story of a remarkable American. It deserves to reach a wide audience and reading it is time well spent.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2021
