Benjamin Landa, a successful owner of a group of nursing homes in the Bronx, has reached heights that his parents could hardly imagine. His father, Yehoshua Boruch Landa, but known as Samuel, came to the United States unable to speak a word of English and broken from the loss of his wife and children in Auschwitz. His father, who served as a rabbi in Bishkov, Czechoslovakia, before the Holocaust, immigrated to the United States after the war, as did Landa’s mother, Chaya Sarah Landa, in 1948. They met in the United States, first settling in Newark, N.J., and later moved to Brooklyn.
Neither could speak English, but both learned and insisted their sons speak only English at home. The village he had lived in changed hands from Hungarian, to Czech and is now part of Ukraine. His mother was from a small village in Hungary. Both lost their spouses in Auschwitz.
