Angels in the Forest

Copyright © 2006 by Earl Greif

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Prologue

CHAPTER 1   ‘Raus, Raus!’

CHAPTER 2   As Rustic As It Gets

CHAPTER 3   Final Solution in the Ghetto

CHAPTER 4   Russians to the Rescue

CHAPTER 5   Getting to America

CHAPTER 6   Reizel’s Story

CHAPTER 7   Living the Ultimate Dream

CHAPTER 8   Holocaust Retrospective

Epilogue

ANGELS IN THE FOREST

"This is a fabulous, gripping story.

The first person style makes it come alive.

There is usually a nice dose of suspense

at the end of each chapter, making you want

to turn the page"

Arnold Ismach

Former dean of School of Journalism

at the University of Oregon

"I read Angels in the Forest with great interest

and admiration. I think it’s a terrific book.

The extraordinary and significant detail are

the reasons.

If there is a truth to the cliché, a triumph of

the human spirit, then this book proves that truth."

Ira Berkow

A feature writer

with the New York Times

"Earl Greif’s Angels in the Forest reflects the man and his mission.

It is a work of simplicity and passion, written with integrity and decency.

He has born witness and told his story in a way that is faithful to the

past and challenging for our future.

Students will read it with admiration for his resiliency and adults

will see a model of how to transmit a past that is so different in a way

that invites one in rather than tell us that we cannot understand."

Michael Berenbaum,

Professor, the University of Judaism

Director, Sigi Ziering Institute

Former Director of Holocaust Research Institute

In memory of my parents,

Yitzchak and Miriam Greif,

And baby Dvorah…

With special love

For my wife, Shirley

Foreword

Earl Grelf is toying with a humongous slice of strudel that he ordered when I sit down with him for the first time at a local delicatessen. He really isn’t much interested in the bakery confection and offers me a generous portion. Earl basically wants to talk. He has a story to tell.

And so with only a perfunctory introduction, he starts to relate the episodic drama of a teenage boy and his pre-teen little brother stranded, without a soul to lean on, in the middle of the genocide that entrapped them in central Europe, how his family was virtually wiped out during the murderous German conquest of his native Poland that triggered World War II, and how the two youths managed to survive for the next six years through starvation, privation, and the most cruel circumstances imaginable.

The man who sits dabbling occasionally at a crumb of the strudel while he relates his harrowing account is not unknown to me. Ten years earlier, I was the president of the California chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill—a support and advocacy group for the families of those who suffer a severe form of mental illness that affects four million Americans nationwide—and on a list of donors I noted the name, Earl Greif, Rancho Mirage, Calif. (the same community in which I reside), with a multi-figure amount after it. Through oversight, negligence, or just happenstance, I have never met him, though I am aware he is a retired real estate magnate who moved from the Los Angeles basin. We have a common interest—we have sons who struggled with mental illness for all their adult lives.

Every time a charitable cause in our area is publicized, Earl Greif’s name is invariably attached to it. Most notable is the Holocaust Memorial of the Desert, in Palm Desert, Calif., which he co-founded. The tragedy of the millions who perished in Europe has a profound and personal interest for me. My mother’s entire family in the Ukraine was wiped out by the Germans. Not a trace of any of them ever turned up. Two uncles from Odessa on my father’s side died in concentration camps. Two first cousins in the Russian Army fought and were seriously injured at Stalingrad and Leningrad.

At the end of World War II, I joined the 65th Infantry Division, part of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army that advanced into Austria. My battalion stopped at the western bank of the Enns River as it empties into the Danube because elements of the Russian Army, coming from the East, were already encamped on the other side of the Enns. Nearby, north of the Danube, was the infamous Mauthausen death camp, with its ovens still smoking from the remains of thousands of Holocaust victims. (The total casualty count was 119,000 at that site.) When I was transferred to division headquarters in Linz and later as an intelligence officer at an interrogation center in Gmunden, Austria, I came in contact with gaunt Mauthausen survivors, still dressed in the bedraggled, vertical striped garb of concentration camp inmates, who provided us with information on the Nazis in the region. Vivid to me to this day are their sad, sweet smiles of gratefulness at being alive.

I realize as Earl Greif’s story unfolds that, although he was not in a concentration camp himself—he survived a deadly ghetto—he passed through that part of Austria at the very time I was stationed there. (And so, I was to find out, did his older sister.) We have a common reference point.

The man now in front of me is earnest and passionate. He smiles in the right places when the conversation turns casual, but it is a tight smile and not reflected in his eyes, which are difficult to read as he gazes above his glasses. As if his thoughts are off somewhere else. His face is round and doesn’t reveal much emotion. His speech has a European inflection, even after almost six decades in this country, but it is concise and smooth and not at all difficult to follow. He surprises me with the breadth of his vocabulary. He leans forward intently when he has a point to make. I sense the aggression of someone who knows what he wants and is not circuitous about making his intent clear.

He is eighty years old, but, short and fit and with a full mane of wavy gray hair, he moves like a man at least two decades younger. And he is eager, for reasons he reveals only obliquely—people tell me I have an interesting story—to get his chronicle shaped into a book, though he admits he is na’ive about getting it done.

He is realistic. He knows many others have written about the Holocaust, a word that he doesn’t want to emphasize. Nevertheless, he is not deterred. Even after I tell him frankly what such a project entails.

And so he calls a day later and says succinctly, Let’s do it. Close enough to the Nike slogan, Just do it. (My literary experience has been mostly in the field of sports.) Hours and hours of taped conversation ensue, augmented by pages and pages and pages of reminiscences scrawled laboriously in longhand by Earl (for some reasons he shuns his computer for such tasks), and followed by a succession of long e-mails as recollections pop up in his mind.

Some historical perspective and research of that era is injected. His lovely wife Shirley, with consummate ability to express herself—she is a poet—provides additional glimpses of their history. His brother Lou, his sister Reizel, his brother-in-law Elliot, his son Randy fill in some memory gaps that are hazy in Earl’s recollections.

What follows is a collaborative effort that is, however, essentially Earl Greif’s book, reflecting his thoughts and feelings and mode of expression and dredging up painful memories long suppressed. All of this for his peers to remember and for subsequent generations to ponder as a special lesson in human resolve.

—Murray Olderman

Preface

Books do not preoccupy me. For one thing, I am troubled by double vision, and prolonged reading is difficult for me. But there is a parable between a book and a life. Between the covers of the former can be contained the experiences of the latter, for all people to see and share. As one who has by grace of God and fortune survived one of the most gruesome episodes in the history of humankind, I feel impelled to bear witness to what evil can do. And if it takes a book to preserve the reality of that experience as a warning, I can subdue my aversion to the literary and bring to others my particular story.

In dedicating himself to the collection of Holocaust accounts through his Shoah Foundation, Steven Spielberg says, All of us know that the survivors and witnesses have given us a precious gift whose wise use will build a better world for this and future generations.

I do not have the ability of an Elie Wiesel to verbalize inner emotions and present them in almost poetic introspection, but I did late in life learn to share his fervor for making the world aware of the tragedy of the Holocaust. My approach is more blunt perhaps. Certainly less articulate. It doesn’t command as vast an audience. But it comes from the heart.

What I lost in the Holocaust is irretrievable, and only I know the depths of my bereavement—no more but also no less than that of those relatively few who miraculously escaped the clutches of the monstrous murderers responsible for eleven million—grasp that figure and hold it—innocent deaths.

Other books have been written about the Holocaust. No one better described the horrors than the late Primo Levi. No one did more to bring the perpetrators to justice than the late Simon Wiesenthal, in both his writing and actions. But it is wrong to assume there is a surfeit of published material on the subject.

Every story, honestly told, adds worth to the voluminous testimony. Every story draws a new breath of life for those who were sacrificed. My story begins with the most brutal atrocities suffered by my family. I hope it contributes to the history of the Holocaust.

—Earl Greif, Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Prologue

A teenage peasant boy, barefoot and in tattered clothes, trudges down an unfamiliar rutted dirt road leading to a strange village in the rural countryside of southern Poland. It is October 1943, the seminal point in his life. In the midst of the most roiling man-made conflict and carnage this earth has ever endured, that youngster—myself, known then as Shulu Greif—has left behind unspeakable atrocities that have scarred a psyche beyond full healing, that will forever remain in the mind’s cranial recesses and suddenly reappear at unwelcome moments in the decades ahead as scary nightmares that plague me always.

How can I forget? Mama and the baby Dvorah, just learning to walk and talk, torn away from me just months earlier and buried, maybe still alive, in a bulldozed mass grave. Papa left behind in the woods I’ve just come from, surely to die—his haggard face inconsolably sad as his two little boys, the last remnants of his family, walk away forever. My older sister Reizel disappeared, who knows where. I sob involuntarily even now just committing these thoughts and words to a printed page.

Shuffling along beside me on that crude stone-strewn cart path that cuts through the farm land is my little brother Leibele, the streaks of dried tears visible on his tiny smudged face. We are all alone in the world at that moment, without a speck of support from anyone, with only the shmatas on our backs and nothing on our feet—carrying not a single material possession and our stomachs shrunk from years of hunger—without realistic hope that it’s going to get better when that day ends and we have to lay our heads down wherever destiny takes us. All these thoughts go through my mind.

And yet… .

We are free! Escaped from the despicable Nazis.

Am I scared? Of course. All around me still is the hate and danger of war. Do I have doubts? Sure. I have no real education or skills. Do I hesitate? No. I was brought up in an environment where you didn’t ponder. You did. Or you had no chance to survive.

I was raised in a loving family isolated on a little farm where we thrived on the fruits of our own labor. We didn’t challenge the authority of our parents. We followed the tenets of our religion, though we weren’t zealots. We didn’t shirk the duties that were laid out for us, but we did have the option of improvising to make them easier. The life was rigid and severe. It imposed a discipline that was supposed to carry us through difficult periods. There was no time for frivolous activity. (But oh, how I envied my cousin Luzer Schreiber when he came to visit us from the closest nearby city of Rudki, riding a spiffy bicycle that I couldn’t imagine owning.) Life was so difficult for us that I couldn’t conceive of anything better on earth. At the age of thirteen and fourteen, I didn’t have any ambition beyond being on the farm. I couldn’t visualize myself doing anything else. Chances are, if the war hadn’t come, I would still be there. I had no ambitions and saw nothing for myself beyond the simple existence that, as far as I was concerned, could last for eternity. It was disrupted in 1939 by the outbreak and chaos of World War II.

Leibele and I have endured four years of suppression and oppression by invading armies of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and made worse by the horrible cruelty, greed, and vindictiveness of the native Polish people among whom we grew up and who ultimately drove us from our home. These forces control the land we roam, but right now they don’t touch us. We are on a path that we have chosen and that, God willing and through our own resources, will restore some normalcy to our young lives. I can’t, however, forget where our journey to escape the terror began

1

‘Raus, Raus!’

We lay huddled together in our misery, rough straw barely shielding the lean skin and bones on our skeletal bodies from contact with the hard, mottled floor on which we curled at night. The early spring chill seeped through the filthy rags that served as bed cover and through the threadbare clothes we wore day and night. Constant pangs of hunger and thirst thrust into our uneasy, fitful, cough-racked slumber. Suddenly in the early morning hours of April 9, 1943, we were startled by loud shouts from the darkness outside our ghetto barracks. They mingled in chorus with the growl of heavy motors and the clattering drum beat of banging doors, punctuated by sporadic gun shots.

The noise awakened me, but I felt like I was in the midst of a strange dream with my eyes open in that dark room. I separated myself gingerly from my little brother Leibele—our bodies curled together seeking warmth—and raised myself up to peek through the window. In the blackness, pierced by flash lights and an occasional flood light, I was surprised to see the black uniforms of booted Gestapo officers—they normally never showed up in our