Holocaust survivor and World War II veteran Vladimir Sats celebrated his centennial year last week at the Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst.
The Holocaust Survivors Center at the JCH marked the occasion with a special tribute during its annual Rosh Hashanah party on Sept. 27, celebrating Sats’ resilience and service.
Sats was born on Aug. 12, 1924, in Kyiv, Ukraine. After completing the eighth grade in 1939, he enrolled in a newly established naval school in Kyiv. With the outbreak of World War II, the school was evacuated to Kazakhstan, and Sats was transferred to a naval medical school. By 1943, he had trained as a paramedic at the Northern Fleet submarine base.
In April 1945, Sats graduated and was deployed to the Far East, serving as a medic in the emergency rescue unit of the Amur River Flotilla. He was stationed in Harbin when Japan surrendered. Following his discharge in 1948, Sats returned to Kyiv, where he earned a medical degree from the Kyiv Medical Institute and worked as a physician. In 1988, he immigrated to Brooklyn, where he has lived ever since.
Assembly Member William Colton and Council Member Susan Zhuang were both in attendance to honor Sats’ significant milestone and present him with a citation from the city.
“I was privileged to join in the festivities marking Mr. Sats’s 100th birthday,” said Colton. “This is such an important milestone, made even more significant because of the unimaginable difficulties he endured as a young man. Mr. Sats truly embodies the strength of the human spirit, and I am honored to have been a part of this important occasion.”
Zhuang echoed Colton’s sentiments, calling Sats a “community treasure.”
“It is very meaningful to mark any person’s 100th birthday,” she said. “It is always a landmark occasion, even more so when that person has come through so much, as Mr. Sats has. He is truly a community treasure.”
