Midtown Atlanta barber Eli Sotto had customers who stuck with him through the decades, when his shop relocated and even after they had no hair left to cut.
Some still visited him at the retirement home after he decided at age 90 to put down his comb and scissors.
“His customers had actually become close friends,” a rarity in modern times, said Sue Verhoef, director of oral history and genealogy at the Atlanta History Center.
In a family of nine, only Sotto and a younger brother survived the Nazi death camps, where he had many close calls.
He was “such a remarkable person,” Verhoef said. He always had “such a positive outlook on life and such a fundamental faith in humanity.”
Eliezer “Eli” Sotto, a native of Greece, beloved owner of The Trim Shop in Midtown Atlanta and Holocaust survivor, died in his sleep April 13. He was 93.
Graveside services were April 16 at Greenwood Cemetery.
Sotto was born April 27, 1923 in Salonika, Greece, a city that was invaded and occupied by the Germans in April 1941 and lost all but 2,000 of 80,000 Jews the Nazis captured.
Sotto, his entire family, and 2,800 other Greek Jews were put on one of the many trains sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the death camps, in 1943. He and his brothers Isaac and Charlo were separated from the rest of the family and later learned their parents and four sisters had been sent to the gas chambers.
Sotto spent three years in seven hard-labor camps and was picked more than once to go to the death chambers but spared.
Once he was sent to work in the fields because the Birkenau gas chamber was overwhelmed. Another time, he slipped out of a line of condemned men into a line of some being sent to clean up the destroyed Warsaw ghetto.
Realizing he could increase his chances of living another day by proving useful to the Germans, he promoted the barber skills he learned from his father. At Auschwitz, he wound up being barber to the commandant. Sotto expected torture, if not death, after nervously nicking the commandant’s ear. But he was able to conceal the nick and was instead rewarded with bread and cheese he shared with older brother Charlo and some other starving men, said his youngest son, David Sotto.
Near the end of the war, Sotto and brother Isaac were being taken by train to a field for mass execution. At a stop in a small town, they saw a group of nuns and Red Cross workers, jumped from the train and feigned being dead. They landed in a Catholic hospital in Prague. Two weeks later, the European phase of World War II ended.
“It was miraculous, of course, that he survived,” David said. “Even more amazing about Dad was that he had to bear witness and suffer through the Holocaust, yet he came out of that worst evil the world has ever seen and was so loving, so generous and so compassionate.”
Sotto and brother Isaac returned to their hometown after its liberation from the Germans. (Older brother Charlo died in the camps.)
Sotto opened a fruit stand in Salonika and met future wife Lucy Levy, who, had also lost all but one of her family of nine in the Nazi gas chambers. They were engaged after a week, son David said.
The couple moved to the United States in 1952 and became U.S. citizens. They settled in Atlanta, where Sotto ran his barbershop nearly six decades and grew a clientele that included former Atlanta mayors Ivan Allen and Maynard Jackson, former Gov. Roy Barnes and television host Bert Parks.
He would share stories, but not grim details, of the Holocaust with family as well as new customers who couldn’t help but notice the concentration camp number 115303 tattooed on his left arm, his son said.
His barbershop was a fixture for 50 years at 849 Peachtree Street, then later in the Biltmore on West Peachtree.
Sotto’s barber chair and barber pole are part of a permanent exhibit at the Atlanta History Center called “Gatheround: Stories of Atlanta.” It focuses on famous and powerful people who helped shape Atlanta, as well ordinary people, such as Sotto, who had an impact in ways less visible but equally profound.
Verhoef once asked Sotto what it was like being a businessman in Midtown in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Had he ever been scared opening and closing his shop? Sotto paused, unbuttoned his sleeve to reveal his concentration camp number, gave a slight chuckle and said: "I'm not afraid."
“That was a life-changing moment for me and the highlight of my career,” she said.
David Sotto said family was the most important thing to his father. “What made him so amazing was the love that he showed to us and his customers,” he said.
“He gave them so much more than a haircut. He would realign their perspective, letting them know if you have a roof over your head and food on your table you have everything.”
Eli Sotto and wife Lucy were married nearly 50 years. He was devastated when she died unexpectedly in 1995, just before they were to celebrate that landmark anniversary, his son said.
Sotto died just minutes before what would have been their 71st anniversary of their wedding day.
Son David said that was likely the way his father wanted it.
“He wanted to make sure to get to heaven then so neither of them would have to spend another anniversary apart,” he said.
Sotto is survived by his children, Rachel Levi (Haim) of Tampa, Vicki Sotto Flink (Barry) of Atlanta, David Sotto (Diane Abramson; wife Cindy died in 1992) of Atlanta; grandchildren David Flink (Laura) of San Francisco; Denise Morrison (Jeff) of St. Louis; Maurice Happy Levi (Rachel) of Cincinnati; and three great-grandchildren, Emma Flink, Danielle Levi and Sarah Morrison.
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