Angels in the Forest
By Murray Olderman and Earl Greif
()
About this ebook
Murray Olderman
As a Holocaust survivor, Earl Greif was able to come to the ?land of dreams,? America ? what a frightening, exciting and wonderful experience that turned out to be, transformed from a peasant boy in Poland who escaped the Nazi slaughter to successful real estate developer in southern California. He put aside the nightmare of the past and the world of evil to discover so many beautiful people for whom he has eternal gratitude.
Related to Angels in the Forest
Related ebooks
Worlds Torn Asunder: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir of Hope and Resilience Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLive Another Day: How I Survived the Holocaust and Realized the American Dream Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSala: More than a Survivor Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNever to Be Forgotten: A Young Girl's Holocaust Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Writing On The Wall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival: A Holocaust Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnne and Emmett Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristian by Disguise: A Story of Survival Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOur Testimonies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMommy, What’s That Number on Your Arm?: A-6374 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDestined to Live: One Woman's War, Life, Loves Remembered Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Himmler's Hostages: The Untold Story of Himmler's Special Prisoners & the End of WWII Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeautiful Soul: Bella Kurant’s Memoir of the Nazi Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last Stork Summer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Roma Chavi: The Gypsy Girl Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Next Chapter Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSomeday You Will Understand: My Father's Private World War II Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Glass Half Full Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girl Left Behind Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAvrumele: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWarsaw Freedom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWaiting for Mama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Contract: A Life for a Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Two Sisters: A Journey of Survival Through Auschwitz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLuck, Courage, & Miracles: Surviving the Jewish Ghettos of Poland and Escaping the Nazi Death Camps Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Night of the Execution Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKristallnacht: A Tale of Survival and Rebirth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLittle Cyclone: The Girl who Started the Comet Line Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving Memory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHolocaust: Nazi Propaganda & The Horrors Of Gas Chambers In Auschwitz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Biography & Memoir For You
Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Girls Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: the heartfelt, funny memoir by a New York Times bestselling therapist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mommie Dearest Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Ivy League Counterfeiter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leonardo da Vinci Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taste: My Life Through Food Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Reacher Reading Order: The Complete Lee Child’s Reading List Of Jack Reacher Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Rediscovered Books): A Triumph Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Eating Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Angels in the Forest
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Angels in the Forest - Murray Olderman
Copyright © 2006 by Earl Greif
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any
means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written
permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:
iUniverse
2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)
ISBN-13: 978-0-595-41023-1 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-0-595-67860-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-595-85376-2 (ebk)
ISBN-10: 0-595-41023-5 (pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-595-67860-2 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-595-85376-5 (ebk)
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