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1.

It was late May, and inside Ivan Wilzig’s Soho pied-à-terre penthouse, even the bricks of his parapet overlooking Houston Street were covered with black-light paint. The interior walls were littered with bright fluorescent murals that recalled Woodstock or Jefferson Airplane or any broad signifier of an acid trip. With the shades drawn, hundreds of flowers, magic mushrooms, marijuana plants, “every type of Ecstasy pill ever made,” and other Summer of Love iconography on the walls took on that alien violet hue.

Across a long hallway, the word “REVOLUTION” dripped with red paint. “It’s to remind us of the blood that was lost and the murder of the four students at Kent State,” Ivan explained.

Paper butterflies, pink, blue, yellow, and magenta, dangled from the ceiling. “They represent the free spirit of the times.”

His entire concrete floor was splattered Pollock-like with all the colors of the black-light spectrum. “It represents the chaos of the Vietnam War.”

A floor-to-ceiling mosaic of a peace sign — made entirely out of CDs featuring Ivan wearing wraparound shades and frosted tips — stood at the end of the living room hallway. Ivan did not elaborate on its meaning.

We had loose plans to see a DJ spin at a club, so Ivan, a stout man who speaks loudly and at length with an adenoidal Jersey accent, slipped off his leather sandals and went off to change. His bedroom: covered floor-to-ceiling with life-size paintings of men and women having graphic sex in all manner of permutations — the Kama Sutra writ large, 15 or so people in a neon orgy crudely illustrated with yet more black-light paint. The light switch, he revealed to me, was in the place of a woman’s clitoris: “Turn on the light?”

Ivan isn’t a celebrity, but he's been rich enough for long enough that you might mistake him for one. This would please him greatly. His self-funded techno remixes of anthems from the ’60s and ’70s have landed on the Billboard charts, and he has toiled in the reality TV mines, having been featured on VH1’s Hopelessly Rich and Destination America’s Epic Castles, among others.

He is better known by his stage name, Sir Ivan, a techno-hippy (or “Technippy,” a term he personally had trademarked) artist, who winters at the luxury Portofino Tower in South Beach and summers in an ersatz castle in the Hamptons where he hosts lavish parties each summer. The theme for this year's — his 60th birthday — was the Garden of Eden. The dress code on the invitation read: “Fig leaves or less.”

The party, Ivan told me, would require a staff of about a hundred people, tasked with taking care of security, transportation, and hospitality. In keeping with the Eden theme, Ivan would stock the grounds with apples and miniature apple pies; apple martinis and apple champagne. A total of 60 LED lights would be placed on each and every battlement of the castle, lit up like giant candles. Hundreds of rubber snakes would weave in and out of the gates by the tennis court, transformed into a giant dance floor for the 1,500 invited guests. The whole party would cost upwards of $200,000. Rumors had long swirled in the tabloids of nights filled with drugs and orgies at these late-night soirees at his estate, referred to often as the Playboy Mansion of the East Coast. Donald and Ivana Trump attended one in 1997.

“The Hefner thing I feel has already been accomplished,” Ivan told me in his medium Tony Soprano accent, with a confidence so scientifically pure it should be preserved in amber. “So now what's left is to become the next John Lennon. I’m on my way.”

The birthday gala's true purpose was to serve as the release party for his new remix of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” one of seven new remixes of “Imagine” on an album comprised entirely of “Imagine” remixes. It is the song that spurred Ivan’s entertainment career, such as it is, 15 years ago and his favorite piece of music in the world. For the single’s cover art, Ivan even re-created the famous Annie Leibovitz photo of Lennon and Yoko Ono with himself and longtime girlfriend Mina Otsuka, with whom he has had an open relationship for years. The lyrics to “Imagine” are Ivan’s holy scripture: Imagine all the people living life in peace. For Ivan, there is nothing more simple or pleasing than the idea of everyone living out their harmless carnal desires.

“The Hefner thing I feel has already been accomplished. So now what's left is to become the next John Lennon. I’m on my way.”

A few years ago, using his considerable wealth, Ivan commissioned a biography about his father, Siggi Wilzig. Written by Holocaust scholar, filmmaker, and author Joshua Greene, Siggi’s War tells the incredible story of a German Jew who survived the death camps at Auschwitz and immigrated to America, where he became a billionaire banker and oil tycoon. For Ivan, the book was the latest and perhaps most viable venture in a long line of harebrained ventures he has undertaken to write the Wilzig name in the stars.

“A year from now, we'll be getting that book on the New York Times best-seller list and turning it into a miniseries or a major motion picture,” Ivan said, noting that he has hired the best book-to-movie agent in the country. “My goal is to make it more popular than The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Ivan built his life around his father’s story. When he quit working for his father’s bank at the age of 45, Ivan jettisoned his Wall Street suits and entered the entertainment business to spread his characteristically garish gospel of peace and love. Now, in this momentous year both for scions using their inherited wealth to gain unexpected power and for the resurgent threat of Nazism, he believes more than ever that the message of his music and of his family's dark history needs to be spread far and wide — and that the former might somehow facilitate the latter.

“The more violent things are domestically or internationally, the more important my music and that book are,” Ivan told me in December, having just paid $6,500 to get the phrase “Sir Ivan’s ‘Imagine’ on iTunes” tattooed on the posterior of 20-year-old woman from New Zealand. He may not be not the hero we need, or the hero we deserve, but he is the hero who competed on a Syfy show called Who Wants to Be a Superhero? as Mr. Mitzvah, a caped crusader for peace who wielded a small paddle emblazoned with the Star of David.

Ivan re-entered from the bedroom wearing leather shoes and pants, a blue shirt unbuttoned down to the third button where his globe of a stomach took over. For most public appearances, Ivan normally wears one of his 30 or so silken capes, each one bedazzled with peace signs (he sells them on his website for $10,000), but they were all packed in anticipation of his summer stay. Instead, a shining peace medallion rested against his winter-long Miami tan, which is deep-leathered and is, in a certain sense, inspiring.

Our limo waited outside his building, parked on the cobblestone street. It was wrapped entirely in rainbow print and paisley flowers. The word “peace” was printed in tie-dye letters on either side. He calls it the Peacemobile. As we climbed in, a guy snuck a picture of the limo from across the street. Ivan’s assistant Nat handed him his iPad, closed the door, and hurried around to the driver's seat. Today was supposed to be his day off.

The two of us rode in the limo to the club for what was no more than a five-minute drive. Ivan, both wistful and annoyed, told me that if his father hadn't forced him into the banking business for the first 20 years of his professional life, he would be “as famous as Lady Gaga by now.” There was no reason to believe he was joking.

“Ivan wants to fill his father’s shoes, he wants to be great,” said Laura Ford, Ivan's producing partner and the president of his Peaceman Music record label. “He wants to basically just remind people about peace so that we don’t end up in a situation like his relatives ended up. He lost 59 relatives — that’s a lot of people in your family to lose.”

Scenes from Ivan's Garden of Eden party, August 2016.

Drew Reynolds for BuzzFeed News

2.

In Berlin in 1940, the 59 members of the Wilzig family were still alive, including Ivan’s father, Seibert “Siggi” Wilzig. Before the camps, the Wilzigs had moved to Berlin from their first home in Krojanke, which was then part of West Prussia, in 1936.

“I bet you’ve never seen a number as big as this,” Siggi tells an off-camera interviewer, removing his gold Rolex as he rolls up his sleeve, the inflection of his voice rocketing upward. This was around the sixth hour of Siggi Wilzig’s Holocaust testimony for what’s called the Visual History Archive for the USC Shoah Foundation. Out of thousands of interviews with survivors, Siggi’s 10-and-a-half-hour testimony is among the longest in the foundation’s collection. The faded number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz in 1943 reads “104732.” There is a triangle underneath it denoting his Jewish faith. The number takes up more than half of Siggi’s forearm. When his son Ivan was too young to know any better, Siggi told him that he got his phone number tattooed on his arm so he could always remember it.

From left: Ivan's mother, Naomi Wilzig; his father, Siggi; his sister, Sherry; his brother, Alan; and Ivan in this family photo from 2000.

Courtesy Ivan Wilzig

In this footage, Siggi is 76 and has terminal multiple myeloma. He died only four months later in January 2003 after a career as a ruthlessly intuitive mogul in the oil industry and the president of the Trust Company of New Jersey, which at the time of his death owned $4.2 billion in assets. For more than 10 hours, Siggi relays the story of how and why Ivan never had to worry about money.

Siggi recalls that they were trying to make more of an opportunity for themselves in Berlin as a middle-class family faced with an increasingly oppressive Nazi regime. The Wilzigs, along with rest of the German Jews, were stripped of their rights, possessions, and homes. Most of them began working as forced labor. Siggi, then only 14, was interned in a Berlin munitions factory at an industrial lathe, working six days, 72 hours a week. Tears stream down his face when he recalls that, after the war, the company IG Farben offered him only $1.25 per day in reparations.

Siggi’s stories are difficult to listen to. His voice quavers, but his text is exact and deliberate. There are times when he becomes overwhelmed with the clinical questions about who and where and when, trying to sort out a timeline of incomprehensible years. “[I] lived from minute to minute,” he interrupts the interviewer, chiding him. “You’re going from year to year.”

When Siggi arrived at Auschwitz, he was separated from his father, and his brother was beaten to death immediately. Two days later, his mother arrived and with a flip of the thumb was murdered in the gas chambers. “The selections were silent,” he says. “If the doctor at the table wanted you to work, he’d point his thumb to the right. If he wanted to kill you, he’d point to the left.” Siggi would evade this fate almost 20 times at Auschwitz, in part by lying about his age (he was then 16 but told the officers he was 18) and for reasons he and other survivors are beyond articulating.

Surviving the selections, the miracle of it, weighed on Siggi. He repeats many phrases during the interview (which took place over three days, filmed at his home in New Jersey). But perhaps more than any other phrase, he insists that he always believed he was going to survive. Why others did not, however, was something that he could not answer. “Ask me anything,” Siggi says, “but don’t ask me how come they took the shortest and youngest-looking through, and took the taller ones to the gas chambers. There’s no answer.”

In March 1943, six weeks after he arrived at Auschwitz, Siggi finally found his father in the camp. He had been badly beaten by the guards. He couldn’t eat. He was within an inch of his life. Siggi cradled his father in his arms. Siggi’s dark eyes focus on a single point off camera. The words of this story barely escape his mouth.

“I think I literally helped to kill my father,” Siggi says. “An SS sergeant came in with a kettle full of potatoes. They were red potatoes. You would’ve given your right arm for it. But it was all poison. It was all chemicals in it. And I fed 50 people with him, the way he instructed me. The next morning they were all dead.”

Siggi remained for two years at the camp, currying favor to work several jobs, including that of a medical assistant (he had no medical training) and as a Yiddish translator (he also learned Russian within 30 days after he arrived) and sorting the clothes and items of those who had been sent to the gas chambers.

In January 1945, Siggi was a part of one of the most brutal death marches of the war from Auschwitz to the Austrian border — a freezing trek across Czechoslovakia first on foot and then by rail in an open “cattle car” freight train. In the freezing plains, 15,000 prisoners died, but the diminutive and frail Siggi survived, again, for reasons passing understanding. Having lost a shoelace on the march, he spotted a small sapling coming out of the snow, which he then fashioned to keep his shoe from falling apart, to keep from freezing, to keep from falling behind the line, to keep from getting an infection, to keep from being shot. One sapling to live and breathe, to build a fortune. He wound up in the brutal Mauthausen camp, burying the dead with a spade. On May 5, weighing only 88 pounds, he was liberated.

Historian István Deák wrote of the few commonalities in survivor stories in his 1989 essay “The Incomprehensible Holocaust,” where each one seems to begin with “secure middle-class existence interrupted by a lightning bolt of terror” and is followed by “unspeakable agonies; quiet heroism; survival through self-respect and a desire to tell the world about it; liberation; a painful search for a new place in the world; a modest career and a contented family life, although one marred by terrible dreams.” He added, “Still, one cannot read enough of these stories.”

This is Ivan’s aim with Siggi’s War. The story lives underneath the skin and in the blood, nested in the subconscious of Ivan, surrounded by the comfort of money. What Siggi presented in his testimony was retold many times during his career at the bank. When he came to America in 1947, he had $250 in his pocket. By the ’80s and ’90s, Siggi was rolling up his sleeve again, showing clients the tattooed number on his arm as part of a sales pitch.

“Now I’m the president of a $4 billion bank,” he tells the interviewer. Siggi flashes a smile. “I was born to be president.”

Sir Ivan at his castle in the Hamptons.

Drew Reynolds for BuzzFeed News

3.

Among the many things Ivan Wilzig inherited from his father are his dark eyes. They are small and hidden back in his skull. Like his father, he adopts a feral and adolescent look when he says something he knows you’re really gonna like.

Ivan's music career was minted in the wake of 9/11, when a few radio stations picked up on his first remix of “Imagine.” For a moment, Ivan was signed to Tommy Boy Records before the label parted ways with its distributor, Warner Brothers, in 2002, leaving Ivan in the lurch. But his career continued apace through the aughts, with Ivan putting his Technippy stamp on Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” among many others.

Ivan also tackled “Hare Krishna,” for which he changed the lyrics to English and to be about loving one another instead of the Hindu god Krishna. The video for the song, filmed in the back of a hair salon in South Beach, features a scene where Ivan, dressed in an orange cape, intercedes between two men — ostensibly an American soldier holding an M15 and a Middle Eastern soldier holding a Kalashnikov. Ivan places a flower in both of their guns. The soldiers take one last look at each other, drop their rifles, and embrace.

A similar thread runs through the video for Sir Ivan’s remix of “Kumbaya.” A group of black men and women are on a beach, fighting with shields and staffs, warring tribes it would seem, wearing grass skirts and face paint when Sir Ivan appears on the horizon bathed in white light, be-caped of course, singing the chorus to “Kumbaya.” Entranced, the tribe of warriors drop their weapons and start dancing. Then they start to have sex.

Ivan defended the at best cringeworthy and at worst overtly racist “Kumbaya” video. “There was a particular problem during Darfur,” he explained to me back in his penthouse, “where blacks were killing blacks, and nobody was doing much about it. That's why there was a genocide in Rwanda, a genocide in Darfur, because there was black-on-black killing, and nobody was really paying much attention to it or getting involved. That's why ‘Kumbaya’ addressed that particular issue.”

Instead of his songs or the Peaceman Foundation — a private charitable fund through which Ivan funnels any profits or donations he receives from his music career — Ivan himself often becomes the conversation piece. Laura Ford thought this was only a boon to his message. When she came out as trans, Ivan was there, supporting her financially, and it was in part due to her transition that Ivan was inspired to become heavily involved in LGBT charities like the Trevor Project. “Whether it’s his capes or his castle, he spins that into something that is positive and awesome, which is peace.”

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