The fear of silence
By David Suissa
Robert Geminder was six years old when he heard the dogs barking. He was hiding
in a little pantry with his older brother, George. His mother, Bertl, would
always tell them to be extra quiet, because you never knew when "the soldiers"
would show up.
When the dogs got louder, he figured the German soldiers would soon open the
pantry door and find him and his brother, crouching in the corner. He didn't
figure that his mother, with the help of his grandmother, Golde, would think of
stacking firewood in front of the pantry to disguise the smell of the boys. But
that's what they did, and it worked. The dogs and their Nazi bosses left, and
Robert and his brother could breathe again.
This was in 1941 in Stanislawow, Poland. Two years earlier, at the beginning of
World War II, Robert was a 4-year-old living in a nice neighborhood in Bielsko
in Southern Poland. In August of 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, Robert's
town was devastated by the blitzkrieg. His father, Mendel "Mano" Geminder, died
of a heart attack while trying to barricade a living room window with a
mattress. As the troops invaded, his grandfather was executed on the streets,
leaving Robert, George, Bertl and Golde homeless and on the run.
They tried to flee to Russia but were turned back. Eventually, they ended up in
Stanislawow, in one of 300 Jewish ghettos that the Germans had set up throughout
countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania. Before the war, about 3 million Jews
lived in Poland, the largest concentration of Jews in the world. It's estimated
that 97 percent of those Jews died.
To this day, Geminder can't quite fathom how he ended up in the 3 percent that
survived.
It helps, though, that this 72-year-old retired engineer and now schoolteacher
in Saint Mary's Academy in Inglewood has a very sharp memory. As he shares
story after story of his many escapes and close calls and plain old suffering
("I was hungry for six years," he says), it's clear that there were at least two
reasons for his survival.
Extraordinary luck and an amazing mother.
One of his closest calls came on a winter day in 1942 when he was one of 20,000
Jews taken to a cemetery near Stanislawow. There, Jews were greeted by German
snipers who shot them and pushed their bodies into mass graves. Geminder and his
family were "lucky" enough to be among the first batch of Jews to arrive, which
meant they were at the back when the shooting started. By the time the snipers
got to them, after mowing down about 16,000 other Jews, it was dark and had
started to snow, so the Germans took them back to their ghetto.
They survived there for a couple of years. On those rare times when the young
Geminder was not hiding in closets, he remembers seeing "daily hangings and
children being killed and thrown against walls."
One day his mother heard a rumor that the entire ghetto was to be "liquidated."
Her rabbi told her to do whatever she could to "get the children out," so she
came up with an escape plan with the help of a girlfriend. The two women hid the
boys under their skirts as they walked out of the ghetto walls, ostensibly to go
to their "slave labor" jobs. They never came back. Geminder's grandmother, the
rabbi and everyone else never made it out.
For the next three years, until the end of the war, the Geminder clan -- which
by now also included Emil Brotfeld, a man who would later become Geminder's
stepfather -- wandered throughout Poland living on their wits and courage and
hoping only to stay alive.
As he sits now in his modest home in Rancho Palos Verdes, where he has lived for
42 years and where he and his wife Judy are active members of the Conservative
Congregation Ner Tamid, Geminder tells me he's got "maybe a hundred" stories of
how they just barely made it.
"One of those things goes wrong," he says, "and I'm not here talking to you."
But while he's got many stories of survival, there's one story in particular he
keeps bringing up: On May 11, Geminder will don a graduation cap and walk with
students less than half his age to receive his degree in education from Loyola
Marymount University.
He's especially proud of that story. But why would a man get a teaching degree
48 years after graduating from university with an engineering degree?
He can't say for sure, but he thinks it has something to do with the fact that
he loves talking to people, especially young students. For as long as he can
remember, early May has been "his busy period," when Jewish organizations from
across the country recruit Holocaust survivors like Geminder to tell their
stories in schools and other venues. So Geminder knows from talking in noisy
classrooms, and what job could be better than schoolteacher for someone who
loves to talk?
In fact, when you talk to Geminder, the theme of talking and making noise is
never too far from his mind. What seems to haunt him most from his childhood as
a "wandering survivor" is not the fear of hunger or the fear of death -- but the
fear of silence. It's those hundreds of "shhhs" he would hear while spending
most of that childhood hiding in silence.
He prayed that if he ever made it out alive, and had children of his own, that
he would never be forced to keep them quiet. This is another way of saying that
Geminder wasn't too hard on his three children, who are now grown-up, when they
got a little, say, rambunctious.
Sixty-six years after crouching in a pantry in forced silence, Robert Geminder,
survivor and proud new graduate, defines his freedom as having no fear to make a
little noise.
David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Meals4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.