Authors: Henry Orenstein
I stayed with Fred for a couple of weeks, and then we heard rumors of new pogroms in Poland. Once again the Poles were killing Jews; many of them were slaughtered in Radom. I hoped that now Sam
would be willing to leave Poland, but I wasn't sure that he could get out by himself; it was becoming more difficult to cross the borders.
I decided to go back to Åód
ź
. I traveled about ten days by train and on foot, and arrived at Motie's apartment only to be told that Sam had left for Amberg two days before. I stayed and rested in Åód
ź
for a few days, and heard fresh rumors that Hanka had been killed in the Stuthoff massacre, but I refused to give up hope.
I couldn't wait to get out of Poland, and promised myself that once I did I would never return. How could I bear to live in a country where Jews were so hated that even the slaughter of millions of us, children and old people too, didn't soften the hearts of those with whom Jews had lived side by side for centuries?
Once again I started out on the long trip to Amberg. I stopped off for a while in Prague, where I met and became friendly with a Czech girl. We grew to like each other, and she wanted me to stay in Czechoslovakia. One day while walking with her in Prague, I ran into Hy Silberstein. He was on his way to Poland, but I convinced him that there was no future for him there, and he decided to go back to the displaced persons camp in Germany, where a few days later his brother Abram found him. Abram had lived in Palestine before the war. Along with the future leaders of the Israeli army, he had been trained in survival warfare by General Orde Charles Wingate, joined the British army, then the Jewish Brigade, and was promoted to the rank of major in the British army. He had been decorated many times during the war. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander in chief of the British forces, wrote him a personal letter commending him for his bravery. Somehow Abram was sure that Hy had survived the war, so he traveled all over Germany looking for him, and finally found him in a DP camp.
I was very fond of the Czech girl, but wasn't yet ready to get tied down, and decided to rejoin my brothers in Amberg. Soon after I
returned there we received confirmation of Hanka's death from Pola Ries, one of the thirteen survivors of the Stuthoff death march.
After the Russian armies had cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany in January 1945, the SS started to evacuate Stuthoff and all its satellite camps. They marched thousands of Jews, most of them women, in the bitter winter cold and howling winds toward the Baltic Sea. At night the prisoners slept on the snow, without cover. Thousands froze to death. Those who were unable to walk on were shot. Of all the death marches, this one was by far the worst. Those who survived the twelve days of this hell were literally driven into the Baltic Sea, where a thin layer of ice had formed at the shore. The ice couldn't support the weight of so many people, and they drowned in the ice-cold water, while the SS shot them from the shore. So died my sister Hanka, not quite nineteen, just a few days before the Russians arrived.
The United States government opened its gates to more than a hundred thousand survivors of the Holocaust, and through our Uncle Morris (Moshe) Orenstein in New York, Fred, Sam, and I obtained visas. We spent about two years in various DP camps and in an apartment in Stuttgart along with Fred, who was practicing medicine there, waiting for our immigration papers to be approved. I spent the time reading, playing chess, going out with girls, and learning English words; I memorized over two thousand words from an English dictionary. Finally, on September 24, 1947, we boarded the SS
Fletcher
, a Liberty ship, in Bremen. After a stormy passage we arrived in New York harbor on October 2, 1947, and as the ship moved into the harbor we were on deck marveling at the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. Uncle Morris and Adele Bigajer, a girl I had met in one of the DP camps in Germany, were waiting for us, and Morris took us to a room in Manhattan that he had rented.
This was all very exciting and promising, but I still had one big question: Was there any anti-Semitism in the United States? I had heard conflicting stories about it. To settle the matter, I immediately bought two newspapers, the
New York Daily News
and the
New York Mirror
(now defunct). I had been told that these two papers were somewhat anti-Semitic. I read both of them straight through, which took me far into the night, and found not a single anti-Semitic reference in either one of them. I sighed with relief. The stories of American anti-Semitism were exaggerated.
I soon found that even though I had memorized the meaning of more than two thousand words, I still had trouble understanding people. There was more to it, I discovered, than vocabulary; there were also the many idioms. But I learned fast. I was working hard; my first job was with Jonathan Logan, the dress manufacturer, lugging bales of cotton. I married Adele, worked at a few other jobs, and bought and sold a grocery store. Then Uncle Morris suggested that we go into business together. He put up $40,000, and I ran the business. In 1956 my daughter Annette was born, and in 1958 my son Mark.
Our business grew from a small novelty company to become one of the largest toy manufacturing companies in the country. I became a millionaire. Then I made some bad marketing mistakes and lost all my money. My marriage wasn't working out, so Adele and I were divorced. I was lucky to meet and then marry Susie Vankovich, a girl from West Virginia. It was Susie who urged me to write this book. I gave up manufacturing and became an inventor of toys.
My new business was quite profitable, and I became active in charity work, particularly with the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty. Susie and I are interested in helping the elderly poor of New York, both Jews and non-Jews. We arrange for iron bars to be installed in the apartments of the poor,
who are burglarized frequently; we buy beds for those in need of them; we provide money to move the elderly out of dangerous neighborhoods; and in general we do what we can to make their lives a little easier.
Recently a federally funded building with a hundred and forty small apartments for the elderly poor was under construction on Manhattan's Lower East Side. There was no provision in the funding for a security system, guards, air-conditioning, or luncheon facilities, all of which are essential to the elderly, so Susie and I provided the money for these things. In appreciation, the management of the building named it the Lejb and Golda Orenstein Building, in memory of my parents. The eleven-story structure is on Bialystoker Street in Manhattan, between Grand and Delancey Streets. Above the main entrance is a sign, “Lejb and Golda Orenstein Building,” and there is a commemorative bronze plaque in the entrance hall. It gives the names of my parents and of Felek and Hanka, and the date on which each of them was murdered by the Nazis.
It seems a fitting memorial to them, even though it is in a country they never saw, for this is the country that gave us, the surviving children, freedom and a new life.
Information on Key People Mentioned in this Book
Murdered by the Nazis:
The Orenstein Family: all except my brothers Fred and Sam, cousins Motie, Elezer (Bucio's son), and Rose Toren.
The Strum Family: all except cousin Józiek (died of cancer in 1981). The Peretz Family: all except son Lolek (now in Israel).
The Lichtenstein Family: all.
The Burstyn Family: all.
The Silberstein Family: all except Hy.
Survived:
Bencio Fink and David Rotenberg now live in Israel.
Chaim Ajzen and Tobka Becker joined the partisans, were married, and now live in Australia with their two children.
Jurek Topaz now lives in the United States.
The “mathematicians” all survived, with the possible exception of the lady who worked with us in PÅaszów but did not rejoin us in Ravensbrück.
The Nazis:
Hans Wagner was captured after the war, sentenced to death, and hanged.
Demant was sentenced to life in prison by a German court.
Waldner, the Gestapo chief of Hrubieszów, was freed by a German court.
Alex disappeared after the war.
Dr. Gross was tried and hanged in Poland after the war for collaborating with the Nazis.
I have received word from Mordechai Paldiel, Director, Department of the Righteous, that Mrs. Lipi
Å
ska was nominated for induction into the “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles.” The “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles” is a path near Yad Vashem (Israel's memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust), which commemorates Gentiles who saved many Jewish lives at tremendous risk to their own and their families' lives. There are trees planted and marble plaques for each of the Righteous Gentiles. This is an exceptional honor for Mrs. Lipi
Å
ska.
Henry Orenstein is a philanthropist, inventor, entrepreneur, and Holocaust survivor. After surviving World War II, much of it in various concentration camps, Orenstein became a toymaker who convinced Hasbro to start producing Transformers in the U.S. He holds over 100 other patents, the best-known of which gave Orenstein the exclusive rights in the United States to detect and display a player's hidden cards to the audience in poker games, one of the principal reasons that televised poker is so popular today. Orenstein is the creator and executive producer of the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament as well as the popular TV show
High Stakes Poker
. In 2008 he was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame.
*
The German general Heinz Guderian, who commanded the tank formations, saw an opportunity to wipe out the entire BEF of several hundred thousand men, which would deal the British a crippling, perhaps a knockout, blow. Knowing they had not had time to organize the evacuation of their troops, he wanted to strike the final blow before they got a chance to do that. To his astonishment, Hitler ordered him to hold off. Again and again Guderian, knowing that this unique chance to wipe out the British army en masse was slipping away with every passing hour, pleaded with his Führer for permission to press the attack and drive the British into the Channel. And again and again Hitler denied permission, until it was too late. An improvised armada of ships of every size and description was forming in England's ports, and would soon come to the rescue of their countrymen. Under intense and continuous bombardment by Goering's air force, the British navy, and civilians as well, plying steadily back and forth across the waters of the Channel, managed to evacuate over three hundred thousand British soldiers and thousands of French in the space of a few days. All their equipment was lost, but they lived to fight again.
Military historians are still debating the reasons for Hitler's fatal hesitation. The prevailing view is that he was so surprised by the lack of resistance to Guderian's attack that he began to suspect some sort of trap for his overextended forces. Whatever the reason, Hitler's failure to act had a far-reaching effect on the course of the war. Without those hundreds of thousands of their best-trained officers and men, the English would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to fight the victorious Germans alone, for more than a year.
*
Looking back now, from the perspective of time, I believe that Hitler's greatest blunder in World War II was his treatment of the local populations in the territories the Germans captured from the retreating Soviets. Most of these people hated Stalin and his regime. In the Ukraineâand, judging from the accounts of friends and relatives who were there at the time, in Byelorussia as wellâthe great majority of the inhabitants wanted to see Communism destroyed. They had always dreamed of an independent Ukraine and Byelorussia, even though throughout most of their history they had lived under the dominion of others. For centuries, Russians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, and Mongolians had taken turns occupying these areas; only sporadically, as in Chmielnicki's rebellion three hundred years earlier, had the Ukrainians had a taste of independence.
I am convinced that had the Germans announced the immediate formation of Ukrainian and Byelorussian governments under nationalist leaders, and had they treated the people well, played down occasional partisan activity, and conducted themselves as liberators, they would have enjoyed considerable support from the local population. Even in Russia itself, had they come in with such slogans as “Liberty from Communism,” or “We want to give Russia back to the Russian people,” Russian resistance both on the fighting fronts and in the conquered areas would have been much weaker. By behaving like brutal aggressors, treating the local population as racial inferiors, confiscating their possessions, and literally starving to death hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, they gave the people no choice except to fight to the bitter end, even under the hated leadership of Stalin. Had Hitler turned this simmering dislike of Communism to his advantage, he probably would have succeeded in occupying Moscow and Leningrad, perhaps bringing about the collapse of the Soviet armies late in 1941. And without the enormous pressure the Soviet army exerted on the Germans later on, it would have taken the Allies many more years, perhaps decades, to win the war. It is not even inconceivable that in such circumstances the British, and perhaps the Americans as well, would have concluded that a temporary truce with Hitler, however uneasy, might be preferable to a very long, costly warâand, given the uncertainty as to which side might first develop devastating new weaponry, perhaps an unwinnable one.
*
It was the infamous massacre of Babi Yar.
*
Hitler's generals did advise retreat in order to save the army. Had Hitler taken their advice, the retreat might have turned into a rout. But he refused, and ordered anybody retreating to be shot. The generals were dismayed. They had never liked Hitler, and now they hated him. “The man is mad,” they said. “He knows nothing about military strategy.” But the generals were also frightened that Hitler would order the Gestapo to kill them, so they obeyed. The German soldiers followed their orders. They died by the hundreds of thousands, they froze to death, but they gave ground grudgingly.