(Photos: Carlos Chattah)

Samuel Colman retired to a comfortable apartment in Florida’s Century Village a few years ago. There are lots of frum Jews there — the shul membership tops 1,000 people — and he mostly passes unnoticed. Dressed in a plaid cotton shirt, he looks like any other relaxed Florida retiree, like just another mispallel.

When people would ask what he does, he’d tell them: “I’m writing a memoir.” Typically, that elicited skeptical looks. “People would think, Who does he think he is?” Mr. Colman chuckles. “So I wrote up a one-page summary of my life story and posted it on my website, samuelcolman.com.”

It immediately shut down the skeptics. “I’ve had a very interesting life,” the 85-year-old Colman says, speaking from his book-lined study. “Although sometimes I wish it had been less interesting.”

In fact, the not-very-tall and slight-of-build retiree has a large and distinguished career behind him. While working in Rockland County as an engineer, he was elected to the Rockland County Legislature, eventually becoming its chairman. Two terms later, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he became the assistant majority leader. Then he served for eight years as a judge in the Town of Ramapo Justice Court, before hanging up his robe.

This would be impressive enough for an American-born frum Jew. But Judge Colman’s success is all the more striking precisely because he’s not American-born. By any standard, you might say he’s from an “underprivileged” background, growing up as an orphaned refugee who well remembers the hungry years and the struggles to find a home and footing.

“But I’m not interested in simply remembering hard times,” he says. “I’m interested in telling the story of how I overcame the hardships I faced.”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Colman was born in 1933 in Wadowice, Poland, a town near Cracow best known as the birthplace of Pope John Paul II. The family then moved to a village called Jordanow. His grandfather was a Bobover chassid, and he still retains a warm feeling for Bobov chassidus. “When I got married in 1957, I lived in Crown Heights, and the Bobover Rebbe was there,” he says. “His gabbai still remembered my grandfather.”

He remembers going to cheder in Poland and shul with his father. His mother was well-educated for her time; she’d learned German, English, and how to play the violin. Inspired by religious Zionism, she wanted to move to Eretz Yisrael, but his father — who had lost his own father at a young age and become responsible for all his siblings — didn’t feel he could leave.

They were forced to move when word came in 1939 that Hitler was on the way. As they lived on the western border of Poland, they began traveling east toward Russia along with many other Jews and some Poles who knew Hitler wouldn’t be friendly towards them. About two weeks into the trip, they began seeing Russian soldiers everywhere; unbeknown to them, Hitler and Stalin had signed a pact to divide Poland between them, and they were now considered “liberated” by the Russians.

Most Polish Jews, however, weren’t interested in being liberated. Not understanding just how dangerous the Nazis were, they registered to return home, believing the Nazi-Soviet pact meant the war was over. “That was seen as treasonous by the Russians, who weren’t happy that we didn’t appreciate becoming part of the Soviet paradise,” Colman relates. “At that time, of course, no one anticipated that Hitler would attack Russia.”