>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Herschel Greenblatt on Tuesday,
July 8th, 2014
at Sturgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
Mr. Grinblat, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes, I do.
>> All right. Thank you.
If you could, please state your full name at birth.
>> My full name at birth was Grisha Grinblat.
Spelled G-R-I-N-B-L-A-T.
>> And when and where were you born?
>> I was born April 24, 1941,
in a small town called Kremenchuk
about 50 miles east of Kyiv in the Ukraine.
>> And Mr. Grinblat could you tell me
about your parent's background?
>> My father was born in Lublin, Poland, 1919.
He was a student
and my father was the youngest of 16 children,
15 of those children were girls.
He basically was just a typical teenager
growing up with a fairly orthodox Jewish family.
My mother was born in Kremenchuk,
Russia in the Ukraine in 1916.
She was one of six children.
She had two sisters and three brothers,
and both of her sisters
survived the holocaust because they
left with a Zionist organization
in the early 30s to Israel.
I don't know much about her education.
She didn't speak that much about it.
She just grew up again,
in a fairly orthodox home in Kremenchuk.
>> And you said your father's family was orthodox.
So what anti-semitism did they face in Lublin?
>> Basically, Lublin had a fairly small ghetto area.
They were pretty much confined to
that area as most of the Jewish population in Lublin.
Because of their proximity just to where they lived,
it was all Jewish families.
I think the whole Jewish population in
Poland felt anti-semitism,
felt that they were being discriminated against just
by the type of work that they could do.
They felt that they weren't
the opportunities that other people had.
>> And your mother in the Ukraine?
>> That again, she didn't speak that much about,
her they just lived in a small town.
I don't believe there was any particular ghetto area
for Jews in Kremenchuk.
I don't really know that much about her family history.
>> How did your parents meet?
>> In 1939 when
the Nazis and Hitler did invade Poland,
my father became part of
a resistance fighter group fighting the Nazis.
He told me that they would go out at night and they
would throw Molotov cocktails at German tanks.
They would blow up bridges.
They would try to put as much I guess,
resistance toward the Nazis.
And one evening in late September of 1939,
my father went home and was told by
his mom that the SS troops were there that
afternoon looking for him and that he had to
report to them or the family would be taken to Majdanek,
which was the concentration camp outside of Lublin.
Instead of I guess reporting,
he and some of his friends escaped across
the border into the Ukraine and
met up with a resistance group
that my mother was part of,
again, fighting the Nazis that
lived outside of Kremenchuk
in the pre Scranton caves
hiding there and coming out at night and again,
fighting as resistance fighters.
>> So why do you think that
your parents joined resistance groups?
>> They were young.
They felt that they didn't want to
be I guess, annihilated.
They felt that they had to do something.
I mean, don't just be slaughtered like
cattle and not do anything about it.
They felt this was their homes and they wanted
to protect their homes and they wanted to I guess,
protect their way of life.
>> So did they have a marriage ceremony?
>> Yes. The synagogue in Kremenchuk.
They were married August 5th of 1940.
And then I guess they joined,
it was a group that stayed together for
years in Kyiv and
lived in the caves Subterranean caves,
and that's actually,
where I was born was in one of those caves.
>> So how did their lives change after
the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941?
>> Well, for two-and-a-half years,
they did live in the caves,
would come out at night.
And my mother was very badly wounded in
a skirmish one evening and I was born in April of '41.
This I believe happened in September of 1941,
where she was wounded in the upper right leg
and my father felt that she was about to lose her leg
and wanted to get her medical attention.
At that point, he actually left me with his friends.
This was a very close knit group.
A lot of them actually escaped together
out of Russia after the war.
So this group of friends took
care of me for about nine weeks
while my father took my mother for medical attention.
Where he took her, he never did tell me,
but when he came back, I was still there.
According to them, I was very ill.
I had bad dysentery,
diphtheria but I was still alive and
I survived all my illnesses
but we lived in the caves of of Ukraine.
>> So the German invasion
forced them into hiding in that way?
>> Yes. Forced most of the young Jews into hiding,
into groups of resistance fighters living in the caves,
living in the forest,
coming out at night trying to get food
or do whatever damage they could to to the Germans,
the Nazis, basically shooting,
just regular battles, and then going back into hiding.
>> Did your parents tell you of any
specific resistance acts that they carried out?
>> My father said that a lot
of what they did is they tried to derail a lot of
their transportation aspects of
the Nazis coming into Germany,
they would blow up some bridges.
They would blow up train tracks.
They would start forest fires in front of them.
Again, coming out at night with
whatever weapons and ammunition that they had.
>> So what are your earliest memories?
>> My biggest earliest memory is being on
the train and there were
two box cars that my father and his friends either
bribed or bought or somehow or other were able to
get and about 20 somewhat families were
in these two box cars trying to escape out of
Russia before the Iron Curtain came down in 1945,
this was very late 1945.
It was about 2,000-mile trip that
they took that took about eight weeks from,
I think it was [inaudible], Russia,
which was even further east that they escaped,
they left the [inaudible] caves after
about two-and-a-half years because
they were going to be found out.
So when they left Russia,
I guess I was four years old and my second sister,
Anne was three years younger than me
was born when we escaped.
That was my first big memory.
Being on that train,
being huddled in a corner.
We would stop at night and they would let us go out,
take us off the box car and we would go
underneath and just go to the bathroom,
do whatever we had to do
and the parents would go out and try
to find some food from local farmers or whatever.
And I just remember
the the awful smell inside those [inaudible].
And my sister was very ill.
Anne was very ill and she cried constantly.
And my parents were told that they had to get her quieted
down because they would be stopped for days
at a time trying to avoid,
it wasn't the Nazis anymore,
trying to avoid the Russian police and the Russian army
because they were trying
to stop people from escaping out of Russia.
That 8,9 week trip into
the American zone of Austria was my first memory.
>> So let me go back in time a little bit.
Could you tell me
how your parents described life in the caves?
Give us an idea of that experience.
>> The [inaudible] white caves, again, are subterranean.
And some of the openings were humongous.
The temperature was in
the high 50s most of the time, very dark.
They lived by candlelight,
cooked by whatever means they had,
whatever fires they could.
Pretty much stayed inside the caves at all times.
The only time that they left
was either to find food from, again,
local farmers or they go out
and fight by whatever means they
could in their resistance efforts.
So we stayed in the caves pretty much at all time.
From what I understand,
I was a year and a half,
two years old when they came out of the cave.
So I didn't see much sunshine
for the first two years of my life.
My father said when the kids finally came out of
the cave we couldn't
fathom the sunshine or anything like that.
Our eyesights were not the best at the time.
But we would just live like that was our home.
That was it.
At times we would be herded into a corner or again,
this is my father to hide because
the Nazis were trying to get inside of the cave,
trying to find whoever they could down there.
The people that live down there had to have
a secret word or
secret phrase because you had to go down feet first.
And if you couldn't tell them the secret word
or the secret phrase or whatever,
there was no mercy.
They would just chop your legs off.
It was to that extent where they
had to be very careful or they would have been found out.
>> So what sort of food were they able to get?
Was it mostly stealing food or hunting?
>> Mostly whatever vegetables and they could
either buy or get from the local farmers, chickens.
My dad told me that they still try to keep as much of
a kosher environment because
everybody was fairly orthodox, a kosher environment.
So it was mostly chickens
and some beef, as far as I know.
>> And as you say, keeping Kosher,
how about those religious customs?
How were those maintained?
>> Again, my dad said Jews pray every morning.
And they have the morning prayers,
and then of course, they have
the evening prayers, afternoon prayers.
And the Sabbath they would be down there.
There would still light sabbath candles,
Shabbat candles on Friday night.
And they had a Torah
down there and they would read the Torah Thursday nights,
of course, and then on Saturday morning.
>> And do you know the details
of the fight they were
involved in when your mother was injured?
>> All I know is that they were
blowing up a bridge outside
of Kremenchuk and then the shrapnel hit her leg.
That's all that she would tell me.
>> Do you remember the fellow resistors
who took care of you while your parents were away.
Do you remember their name?
>> No, I don't.
>> So at some point,
your father is arrested by the Russians?
>> That's correct.
Now my father was arrested by the Russian,
but this was in Krasnow, which is,
again, hundreds of miles east of Kremenchuk.
He was out one night broke into
some bakery or an army food supply,
whatever, and was arrested by
the Russian police and put
into a Russian prison for about a year and a half.
And actually, he was released when the war ended.
>> And that is when you made the train trip?
>> That's correct.
>> Did your parents ever talk to you about
the fears they had at that time?
How fearful were they?
How unsure were they of what
would happen the very next day, the very next moment?
>> My father was a
very quiet as I was growing up very quiet,
very strong, very disciplinarian.
He very rarely talked about how he felt or what happened.
My mother was also very guarded in what she told us
about what happened and her main concern after the war,
as we were growing up was taking care of her children.
But they didn't speak of their fears.
They didn't speak of their
concerns or anything like that.
My father found out that he lost his whole family
at Madonic and my mother
found out that she lost her family at Babi Yar
so their determination to
make sure that I and my sister Anne and later on,
of course, my sister Ethel that was born in Austria,
that we were safe.
My father's main objective was
to get his family out alive.
He was not going to become a victim of the Holocaust.
>> So you said that let's return to the train trip west.
And this was to carry you out of.
>> Russia.
>> Yes.
>> And Soviet territory.
>> That's correct.
>> Post war?
>> Yes.
>> And so you arrived where?
>> We arrived outside of a DP camp,
a displaced persons camp,
outside of Salzburg, Austria.
I believe it was either December '45 or January of 1946,
because I remember very,
very strongly how cold and the snow,
as we got off the train.
So we arrived at night, and we were met
by a lot of American soldiers taken off the train.
And we were housed at a DP camp called
Beth Bialik outside of Salzburg, Austria.
Basically was a converted army camp of some sort.
The buildings were dilapidated.
You could see the holes and the walls and
the American soldiers did whatever
they could to make us as comfortable as they could.
And we were given given food and medical attention.
But the barracks were so
dilapidated and so run down, almost unlivable.
Families would kind of
become squatters that would just go
into a certain part of that particular barrack,
and I remember they would hang
up either sheets or blankets or whatever they could.
And they would say, this is our area.
This is where our family is going to be.
We slept on the floors.
The barracks were rated infested.
These were big rodents,
just crawling around whatever
heat vents or pipes
were was like steam heat that was trying to So yeah,
we lived we lived in the Beth Bialik for
about a year and a half
under conditions that weren't much better,
but no one was trying to kill us.
>> So how many people?
Can you guess at the numbers?
>> You would be crawling over.
There was hundreds and hundreds of people.
From what I remember, there was as far as I could see,
you could see barracks and each barrack,
there was just people coming and going,
and there was no rhyme or reason to who was there,
who was living there, who wasn't living there.
One day, there was a family there,
the next day they weren't there.
There was a lot of children just running
around and some barefoot.
I remember some of my friends were barefoot.
Some of them had shoes that were opened
up just clothing that
was torn and they did whatever they could.
My father, I guess,
he was more imaginative than others,
was able to find us some warm clothing, some coats,
and things got a little steady, a little normal.
>> What was the food?
>> Basically brought in by the government.
Every day there would be trucks
of food coming into the camp.
A lot of canned goods.
A lot of powdered milk was all over the place.
It was just powdered milk, powdered eggs,
and that type of food is whatever was easy.
There wasn't a lot of cook there was no place to cook.
They would go out and I guess, make fire pits and
my mother went out and they would cook whatever they
had if they were able to find a chicken
and make some chicken soup or still tried to maintain
that Jewish type of cooking but
it was mainly ready-to-eat type
powdered canned and boxed foods.
>> And bathing?
>> No such thing. Bathing they would get metal tubs,
and at the end of each barrack,
there was I guess either like latrines or whatever.
And of course, there was water.
That was piped in, and they would get water,
and they would try to heat it as best as they could.
And my mother would just put us in a tub
and it was my sister,
Ethel, who was an infant.
And my mother would bathe us quite regularly.
This is the thing that I remember about my mom.
My mom was only five feet tall but
nowhere would you find a stronger willed woman.
Again, her main objective was her children.
She loved us and she took care of us
and she made sure
that we had the best of whatever she could get for us.
So she'd make sure that we got
our Jewish type education, our Jewish heritage.
She'd make sure that on if a holiday came by,
we knew what the holiday was for.
They would try to get whatever food
pertaining to that holiday for us.
My mother was, as we grew up,
the most fantastic cook that I
guess every child said that their mother
was a great cook, but she was.
She was just unbelievable.
Later on, I can tell you
some stories about what she did for
Jewish American soldiers when
we moved here when my sisters
became involved and started dating some Jewish soldiers.
And what she did for
them as my sisters were dating and became
friends with a lot of specifically Jewish soldiers
from Fort Benning.
>> So what was the sleeping arrangement in
your small area that been defined for your family.
>> No sleeping arranged.
We all slept on the floor.
I slept next to my father.
And and then my sisters
slept on the floor next to my mom,
and that was it.
We slept on the floors.
There was no furniture.
There was nothing.
This is basically where we lived,
and in the mornings,
my mother would take
whatever blankets or sheets we had and
tried to go wash them
and try to keep it as clean as possible.
Almost every day we were taken
to an area and deloused they would spray us
with the delousing powder
because there was a lot of lice infestation.
There was a lot of just all kinds
of critters crawling around.
The American soldiers did whatever they could.
There was a big presence of soldiers
in Beth Bialik but they were overwhelmed
because there was just hundreds
and thousands of people in
that camp that were homeless.
They had no other place to go.
So it was people on top of each other.
>> Was there some semblance of a community?
Did you have a post office or?
>> Not in Beth Bialik.
Because people people were
coming and going a lot of people
left to see if they could
find family members in other camps.
One day I was playing with
a kid and the next day he wasn't there.
Not in Beth Bialik,
there was no cohesiveness,
there was no any sense of community whatsoever.
People pretty much found it for themselves.
>> Did that come at the second DP camp?
>> Yes.
>> And when was that?
>> About a year and a half later,
I would say end of 1947, something like that.
We were transferred and people were transferred, I guess,
as they came to a camp called Beth Israel
outside of a town called Hallein,
which is about 50 miles east of Salzburg.
In this particular camp,
there were actual rooms.
I think the room we were in is about
the size of this room right here.
But it had a door, it had a window.
And again, very little furniture, no furniture.
I remember the crib because I was the only boy,
so they had me in the crib,
because when my mother was bathed,
I would be able to face the wall and
both my sisters would
stay on the floor with my mom and my father,
still slept on the floor.
I remember that my dad when he
finally was able to make
some money and whatever endeavors,
and he did a lot of different things,
actually bought a stove,
a wood burning type stove that put up against the wall,
and then it was vented outside the window,
he was able to vent it.
And on one side of the stove,
I remember was just an opening
where you could boil water.
Just pour water in there,
and of course, it would steam up,
and then it had an area where my mom could cook.
And he was one of the only ones in
the camp that actually had a stove.
Again, my dad was very self sufficient.
He did a lot of things that, again,
his main purpose in life was his family.
>> So was he dealing with
maybe a black market side of the camp?
>> Yes. Outside the camp.
There was an area in Hallein.
I remember it was a corner area,
and about four or five of he
and his buddies would stand there and they would
barter or sell or buy
cigarettes from American soldiers and sell them to
residents and even jewelry
and stuff like Sacrin stuff that was hard to get.
And this is how he made his living.
He bought himself a bicycle,
and he would travel by bicycle from the DP camp,
over to Hallein,
and there was a beer garden off to the side.
I still remember the trees over this beer garden,
typical German type beer garden where
they sat and played cards
and and drank beer and I guess,
did whatever they did as far as making money.
>> So you said there was more community at this time.
>> Definitely.
>> Talk about that.
>> Number 1, there was two synagogues.
There was what they called,
I guess, the big synagogue and the little synagogue.
The smaller synagogue was very ultra Orthodox.
A lot of the people went away from
the ultra Orthodox type of living as they grew up.
So that smaller synagogue is where
we went to hide out when we went to Hebrew school.
And we just sat there with the rabbis and reading,
either reading the Torah and learn whatever we could.
And then the big synagogue is where everybody went,
and had their Friday nights
and Sabbath services on Saturday.
The camp basically closed down Friday afternoon.
A lot of the people that had
a occupation or had a trade.
There was one barrack that they
opened up small areas like a market.
And if you were a shoemaker,
you opened up your own little shoe shop
or your own bakery shop,
a tailor, repairing or making clothes.
And so it became a community
where people started across the hall from us,
and Mr. Shapiro, friends of ours,
and he was the camp barber.
He was the only barber in the camp.
There was lines and lines of people trying to get
into and he had a chair in his room like this.
And he was the barber.
He lived right across the hall from us.
Kids running around all over.
There was hundreds of children my age,
five, six, seven, eight years old.
We would go to Hader.
The American government had
a school that they were trying to teach some English.
That didn't go over very well.
A lot of kids just didn't go.
Life started settling down.
One of my biggest oddest memory
is the mass circumcision that was performed in the camp.
A lot of the children during the war,
that were born during the war or before
the war we didn't have their brist.
Parents were afraid to circumcise their children.
So what happened,
these four and five year old boys were taken and wrapped
in a Talis Talit and put on
a long table inside the synagogue,
and the mole would just go down and say
the prayers and actually
perform the circumcision on these boys.
And then they would,
of course, do they have the glass of wine.
They say the prayer over the wine.
And I was right behind him with my father.
And I remember because I was circumcised inside the cave.
One of my father's best friends was a mole.
And so I had the pleasure of being
circumcised when I was seven days old.
I didn't have to go through that.
But I was right behind my dad,
and I would start drinking
something and I got a little tipsy.
Remember my dad carrying me over to the infirmary,
and I was very sick.
But that's just something that happened.
A lot of my friends for days after that,
were in so much pain.
Their little member was wrapped in gauze,
and my best friend,
his name was Haim Menzigorski.
He lived in the barracks across from us and
he was one of the kids that had to
have their particulars and he was in so much pain,
and he would try to go to the bathroom and
he would go to the side of the
and I would have to wait for him,
and he just cried as he was trying to pee.
So this was the life in the camp.
Basically, the kids would
just run wherever they wanted to,
we would go to the play areas behind the school,
if you went outside the camp,
there was a big lake where you could go
swimming, on Saturday afternoons,
where the main gate of the camp was it
was a little bit of a hill and people would
take their blankets and put it up on that hill
on Saturday during the summer,
and people would go and have their picnics and whatever,
and they would try to get their lives back
in order waiting to
leave and everybody wanted to go to
Israel and the backlog
of people and thousands of people in the camp,
there was no way that everybody was
going especially that immigration
into Israel was pretty much blocked so we lived
there from 1947 till we left in October of 1950.
>> So when did the possibility
of going to the United States
instead when did that become?
>> And I don't know exactly when,
it was 1947, '48,
the International Relief Organization
in the United States and
Austria and I have some papers that
were actually sent to
me from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
These were papers giving us permission to
apply to come to the United States.
They came into the camp and basically,
they set up an office where the American soldiers,
the commandant or the commander of
the camp or whatever said,
anybody that wants to go to the United States,
sign up and my dad wasn't home.
He was doing whatever he was doing.
My mom went ahead and signed up.
What she said is she thought they were kidding.
This was not really happening.
We did sign up and about six,
seven months later, we were given our permission slips,
we were taken our medical tests
and whatever tests that they did,
and in Yom Kippur the
night of Kol Nidre night in 1949,
we were given all of
our papers and basically just told to
wait and that they would tell us when the next step was,
which we were going to be transported to
Bremerhaven Germany embarkation put
on a ship for the United States.
>> And can you tell me about that ship, that trip?
>> In early October of 1950 that's how long it took,
almost a year after we were given we
left the camp and I remember
the first time I ever rode in a car.
And there was a big black car
and about four or five families
and there was cars lined up,
and we left the camp and with
whatever suitcases we had
and taken to a train station in Salzburg Austria,
and we got on the train and left Salzburg,
took about a day trip on
that train going through Germany into Bremerhaven
and this is another memory that I have is looking out
the windows and the total destruction.
There was not a building that was whole as I was
looking out the window on my way to Bremerhaven.
We were put in a holding camp in Bremerhaven.
My mother was put in one
more like a campus is what it looked like,
and then my dad and I were in
another one and we
were there for about a week and a half,
and on the 16th of November of 1950,
we boarded the USS General Ballou,
which was a converted type army transport ship and again,
my mother and my sisters,
because they had the stack type bunks,
like we see in the Navy type where
the Naval people would just sleep on.
So that's what we had. I was in
a top bunk and my father was in a bunk right below me.
My father was able to get a job in
the commissary on the ship so we had pretty good food,
and they had places for kids to play,
and then my mother
and my sisters were in another part of the ship.
And crossing the North Atlantic, that was again,
on the 16th of November of 1950
and two nights before Thanksgiving
we got into the Port of New York
and I remember my father
waking me up real early in the morning one night.
He got me and said there's something just telling me,
and that there's something that he wanted me to see.
And I said, okay.
So I went up there, I guess in 1950.
I was not quite nine years old,
and I went up on deck with my father,
and it was really, very, very cold, I remember.
And that was my first site of the Statue of Liberty.
And my father and I just stood there as the ship
was docking into Ellis Island.
And again, my memory goes back and
looking at my dad and looking at,
did I know what I was looking at?
I don't know, but it was just an awesome feeling.
And then you could look off and see
these humongous skyscrapers,
it was like something out of a movie.
I actually saw and
not only my dad but others that were at
the rail crying and
just sobbing at what they were looking at.
>> So what did the United States
mean to you at that point?
>> At that point, the United States,
I'll be honest with you, didn't mean much to me.
It was just a destination because,
in my young life,
it was so many destinations.
It was different. It was again, just as a child,
looking at this vast array of buildings.
Again, it was just a destination.
We had so many destinations,
so many different times that we were
moving from back and forth.
When we got off the ship at Ellis Island
and if you've ever been to just a big open area,
and we had to wait and we were processed
through and given coffee or milk.
There was more red cross people hovering
around trying to make people comfortable
because we might be carrying our bags and
just everybody was used to being herded around.
For the past five or six years,
we would go where we were told to go, that type of thing.
And so I remember
the first time I had ever had a doughnut.
I remember the doughnuts and milk
and we were given a little rectangular box,
a big red cross insignia on it.
And inside was some stuff that I guess,
the school kids in the United States that
was the big thing back then was for them
to prepare these red cross boxes
for immigrants coming in.
And mine had a white washcloth,
a small tube of Colgate toothpaste, a toothbrush,
first time I had ever seen a toothbrush and
a roll of five flavored lifesavers.
That was inside my red cross box.
>> So did you change your name at this point?
>> At this point according to my original Green Card,
my name was still Grisha Grinblat
spelled I guess phonetically, G-R-I-N-B-L-A-T.
I'm assuming that when we got to Ellis Island
and they asked our names, and again,
I have some papers on the manifest from
the ship that they asked my dad,
he said, Grinblat in his Polish type.
So they spelled G-R-I-N-B-L-A-T
and that's what they put on our Green Cards.
And that initial Green Card
later on in my life was going to be a big hassle for me,
the original Green Card.
My sister's Anne was Alta, A-L-T-A.
My sister Ethel actually was Ethel,
and my mother was Mana,
and my father was Abraham somehow.
So on our Green Cards,
and then we left Ellis Island that afternoon.
Originally, we were sponsored by the Welfare Federation,
the IRO or International Relief Organization
out of the state of Indiana.
And looking at my documentation,
someone crossed out the address in Indiana
on the bottom of our paperwork and put Atlanta, Georgia.
Why and how?
My father could never explain.
The explanation that we were given later
on is that the immigration quota
for Indiana or Newcastle,
Indiana, where we were supposed to go had closed
off or they weren't accepting
any more immigrants or whatever.
So we were put on a train for Atlanta,
Georgia that morning after
we were processed through Ellis Island, and
[NOISE]
we were on our way to Atlanta.
>> And you ran to the station in Washington, DC?
>> That's correct.
That night, we were taken off the train
in Washington at Union Station very,
very late at night,
and this is now the day before Thanksgiving of 1950.
And there are the five of us,
my mom holding Ethel and my dad holding my hand
and my sister Anne's hand
and trying to figure out where to go.
None of us spoke any English.
Again, the site in
this train station in Washington was just humongous,
and there was a group
of soldiers not far from where we were standing.
And for some reason,
one of them walked over to us.
I guess he would recognize that we were immigrants,
the way we were dressed, and I was still in
my German letter husen and whatever jacket I had,
and my sisters were dressed in,
they looked like little
checkerboards dresses my mother had made.
They both looked alike,
and this young Jewish soldier walked over to us.
Well, I say Jewish, we find out.
And he spoke Yiddish to my dad and was
able to finally he looked at my father's papers,
and was able to get us on the right train.
And he had a big bag of tangerines,
the first time I'd ever seen tangerines.
And he took some tangerines out of the bag,
[NOISE]
and gave one to me,
gave one to my sisters.
And he also,
somehow or other out of his pocket,
had brand new 50 cent pieces,
and he gave all three of us
a brand new 50 cent, I still have mine.
I asked my sister a while back what she did with her,
she said, Oh, she spent it a long time ago.
But I still have mine,
I still carry it with me at times just to remind me.
And he put us on that train and
the next night about three or 4:00 in the afternoon,
we came into Atlanta Terminal Station downtown,
and we sat there on the train.
The train stopped. I guess if
the train had a different destination than Atlanta,
we would have gone on.
We didn't know we were in Atlanta,
so for about 2.5 hours, we sat there.
And there was nobody on the train, just us.
And finally, a gentleman from
the Atlanta Jewish Welfare Federation,
came on the train and said, we've been looking for you,
he introduced himself and got us off the train
and got in the car with him and took us to,
there's the Jefferson Hotel,
it's right across the street from
Superior Court in Atlanta.
And remember, we were on the fifth floor in the corner,
corner room of the Jefferson Hotel.
There's the five of us, one bed.
First time we'd ever been in a room where
the bathroom was actually inside the room,
and we were there for about 2.5 weeks.
And they were able to find us
permanent residence with a Jewish family,
I guess, that volunteered to take
immigrants into their homes.
And the particular family we were
with had an apartment upstairs from
where they lived in
a two story in the apartment upstairs,
you had a separate entrance on Capitol Avenue right
where the across the street from
where Atlanta Fulton County Stadium was.
And that was on a Friday afternoon,
and I remember we were on the front porch.
Mr. and Mrs. Goldwasser and their son,
Willie, were there, and a truck drove
up with our big wooden crates that came over,
I guess, from Austria with us.
And my dad opened up the crate and
the one thing that my mother was able to bring
with her from Austria that she bought was,
of course, our silver Candelabra
and she was about to go upstairs
and light Shabbat candles.
And Mrs. Goldwasser brought up a big tray
of baked chicken, pot of chicken soup,
and the biggest chocolate cake you ever saw.
I said, boy, if this is what America
is, so the Goldwassers,
of course, for years,
Mrs. Goldwasser, my mom,
they were about the same age,
were just the best of friends.
Willie and I grew up together.
Willie was a year younger than me.
He was a typical little spoiled American kid.
They were one of the first people
in the neighborhood to have a television.
And at the time,
if Willie felt like he wanted to have company,
he came up the stairs and he would sing, Motorola TV.
Knowing that we were invited to come down and watch TV,
the lone ranger and it was just something.
And the Monday after we got there,
Mrs. Goldwasser took me
and put about as good a clothes as
we had and got me dressed
and my sister Anne dressed and Ethel,
of course, was still an infant and walked us about
4.5 blocks down Capitol Avenue
to James L. Key Elementary School,
and we were met at the front door by Mrs. Cates,
who was the principal,
and Mrs. Gower also handed us some sort of papers.
And at that time, that's the first time I remember
my name was changed to Herschel,
and my sister was changed to Anne.
And that's in our school records.
Later on in life,
well, just a couple of years ago,
I needed to get my school records to try
to get my naturalization certificate.
And it said all my school records from
grammar school through high school,
said Herschel Greenblatt spelled
the way that I'm spelling it now.
So this is where I believe names our names were changed,
was in grammar school by Mrs. Cates.
>> How did you learn to speak English?
>> At the time, there were
two Jewish teachers at James L. Key,
Mrs. Rice, who was teaching fourth grade,
and that's where I was supposed to be
was in the fourth grade.
And again, meeting her,
I remember sitting in the office and meeting Mrs. Rice
and I basically didn't understand what they were saying,
but Mrs. Rice did not want to take
the responsibility of teaching me.
She didn't want to.
And there was also
another young teacher who
that was her first year of teaching
and she was teaching third grade.
And her name was Marcia Fitterman and like I said,
it was her first year of teaching,
and she told she's great that she
would go ahead and take me into her class.
And she's the one that sat with me
and started me out with the ABC type books,
and it didn't take
long in my relationship with the other kids in the class.
I learned how to speak English fairly quickly.
>> And your father eventually opened a store in
the Buttermilk Bottom neighborhood.
>> After we moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Goldwasser,
my father was given a job through
the Jewish Welfare Federation
by a company called London Iron & Metal Company,
which was owned by the Feldman Family.
And through the years, the Feldman's,
they were probably one of
the biggest contributors to Jewish life in Atlanta.
If you go to the museum,
the Breman, their names are all over.
So Mr. Sidney Feldman gave my dad
a job basically as an assistant
to one of the drivers
and they went all over town collecting scrap metal,
bringing it in for reprocessing.
My dad would come home just filthy.
He looked like he'd been crawling
through all kinds of mud and stuff.
But there was one afternoon,
the truck that he was riding in,
was sideswiped by a car or something,
and my dad hurt his back very, very badly,
and he was out of work for months.
And, of course,
couldn't go back to work there.
So I guess at that point,
Mr. Feldman co-signed a loan at the bank,
First National Bank of Atlanta.
I remember that well because it was my job every month
to get on the bus and take
the payments to the bank for that loan.
That was my job,
and so my dad bought a very,
very small neighborhood type grocery store.
It was basically in the bottom of a residence.
It wasn't very big,
the entrance, you had a small little produce section,
then the general groceries, canned goods,
and the counter with the register,
and then you had the meat market
and then the stock room in the back.
It was very, very small.
That was in 1952,
where my dad bought that store and basically served
that community from 1952-1969.
>> Some of his customers?
>> Pardon me.
>> Who were some of his customers?
>> Of course, the bottom of the bottom was a ghetto area.
So it was totally a black area.
Dilapidated buildings.
I remember when he was telling me
that this young kid came into
the store and tried to
steal some produce or steal some food or something,
and my dad stopped him and asked him why he was stealing.
And the kid said well, he was hungry.
And so my dad told him,
if you're hungry, you don't have to steal.
Just ask me, I'll be more than happy to make you a
sandwich, whatever you need.
And then my dad got the reputation in
the neighborhood of offering credit.
It was a big gray book.
It was a ledger-type book that he
bought and families would come.
They would send their children with a note,
and that's how my dad
learned how to speak and read English.
Some of these notes from
these families of what they needed.
And he would fill the order and then he
would put the name in the book.
And then Friday afternoon or Saturday,
he had this long list of what everybody owed him.
And they would either come in Friday afternoon or
Saturday and pay him off for that week.
And that's how he made his living for so many years.
And he became well known.
He was Mr. Abe.
This is how he made his living,
learned how to speak broken English.
>> And one of his customers was Dr. King?
>> Not so much a customer.
Dr. King walked in one afternoon to
his store because Ebenezer Baptist Church
where Dr. King,
of course, was the pastor just about 4.5,
5 blocks south of the store.
And Dr. King walked in and introduced himself.
Dr. King, I guess learned of
my dad's reputation of what he was doing.
I'll be vain and say my dad
was so loved by the community,
it was just a sight to see how the people just flocked to
him and he never had
any instance of anybody trying to rob.
He was there 1952-1969,
and never in that time did anybody try to rob him.
And Dr. King came in,
introduced himself, and they had long discussions.
Dr. King asked a lot of questions with my dad,
and they had discussions about
human rights and about what my dad went through.
Sometimes I was sitting in the corner
and just listen to their conversations.
I tried to sometimes interpret from what I could.
>> And your mother's cooking for get-togethers.
>> Again, this was in the '60.
I was married in 1964 to my wife, Rochelle.
Then my sister started through the USO type situations.
They would drive over to Fort Benning in Columbus,
I guess yes, Fort Benning,
and they had dances and
parties through a Jewish organization
through the Jewish Community Center.
And my sister Anne met
a Lieutenant Herman Perlman
and my sister Ethel met Herman called him Pearl.
He was from the Bronx.
Typical boy.
I could tell you more stories
about my brother-in-law Pearl,
that this guy was just the most unbelievable human being,
the nicest, the sweetest person.
Just left us way too early,
and then my sister Ethel met Stewart Grossman,
who was a lieutenant from Monmouth, New Jersey.
And so they invited the two of them.
We always went to Friday night services.
My father sometimes couldn't go
because the store would stay open late.
He would wait for customers to come and pay him,
but my mother made sure that we
walked over to the Shearith Israel Synagogue,
a couple of blocks away for Friday night services.
And then, of course, we had Shabbat dinner.
And so Anne and Ethel invited Stewart
and Pearl for Friday night dinner.
We had our typical.
My mother would make the filter fish and chicken soup and
baked chicken and sometimes there was a brisket.
She made the most fantastic pound cake
and her apple strudels.
I mean, this was her thing.
All day long, she
scrubbed the floors and made sure
that Shabbat was Shabbat,
what it was meant to be.
I would come home from school and a block away,
you could smell the cooking.
So they came over for Shabbat dinner.
And of course, I think
both Pearl and Stewart fell in love with
my mom before they fell in love with my sisters.
And then the following week,
Pearl asked Anne if he could bring a couple of
his buddies for Shabbat dinner, and of course,
my mom said just bring whoever you want to
bring We lived in an apartment on North Island Avenue,
and the main room,
there was a small dining area.
The building we lived in
was actually a converted small church,
and it was real high ceilings.
It was a big long room.
So my mom would take the table out of
the kitchen and extended
it to the table in the dining room.
Pearl asked if he could bring some of his friends,
some of the other Jewish buddies for dinner,
and my mom said, Sure, bring them.
At some point, there were
20-25 soldiers in my mom's home on a Friday night.
My dad would furnish the turkeys.
He would order Kosher turkeys from a Kosher Empire
distributing and she would
cook a couple of turkeys or brisket or roast.
I mean, there was food all over the place
every Friday night for months.
And then both Stewart and Pearl
were sent to Vietnam in 1968.
And then when they came home,
Pearl came home first
and actually proposed in
a letter while he was in Vietnam to my sister, Anne.
And they were going to marry in late December of 1969.
So Anne was planning this big wedding.
I mean, it was just going to be this beautiful wedding.
All of Pearl's family.
And then about, well,
in the planning stages,
my brother-in-law Stewart came home from Vietnam,
and he and Ethel wanted to get married too.
And my mother said, well, we
can't afford two big weddings.
And so they came up with the idea
of having a double wedding.
So about a week before the wedding.
Everything was planned.
They were going to go up there
together and have this big wedding,
and the rabbi at Shearith Israel Synagogue informed
my parents that according to Jewish tradition,
two sisters could not get married on the same day.
So what they came up with was that my sister,
Anne, was going to get married first.
She got married before sundown.
Then they had this big reception.
Not a reception but,
a hors d'oeuvres and stuff.
And right after sundown,
people went back into the sanctuary,
and then my sister Ethel got married.
So they got married and then Pearl opened up
his own plumbing company here in Atlanta
and in 1992 contracted colon cancer.
And he went to the VA hospital,
of course, and he passed away there.
Didn't get very good treatment, I don't think,
and then my brother-in-law
Stewart passed away from a heart attack,
but he passed away actually after my sister Ethel died.
So that's how my mother treated people.
She was again, the most loving.
You can just picture, like I said,
she's five feet tall and just strong, loving.
She walked with a bad limp after her leg was wounded.
Sometimes when she wore her bathing suit,
we'd go to the beach over at
Calloway and you could see the big scar on her leg.
>> When you think about your family today,
your children and grandchildren
and what your parents
went through, how does that make you feel?
>> I look at my sister, Anne,
she and Pearl had two sons: David,
who is now Dr. David Perlman.
He works for the State of New Jersey as
a medical ethics professor.
He works I guess,
with the medical people
determining who gets medical type treatments or whatever.
What he's contributed,
he's again, a very caring human being.
The young lady that he married, Chrissy,
is the head nurse at
Chops Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
My nephew Mitch, their younger son,
he's a IT with some large financial
company downtown Atlanta.
They have two fantastic young kids.
And so I look
at these my nephews and what they have become,
my sister Ethel, her son,
Harold works as a senior vice president
with Verizon customer service,
what he has become.
I'm married. I had two sons.
I look at my son, Jeff,
who is I senior vice president
with a large food distributor up in Connecticut,
what he's done with his life.
And my son Jacob, who is a works for
a large food company called Super Saver.
They own all the save a lot type,
small grocery stores and he
travels all over the South, quality control.
He makes sure that the stores are up to par
and because these are franchise owners.
Then my son Jeff,
he and my ex daughter in law, have three children.
My granddaughter, Erin, who's now
26 years old and teaches
high school Spanish in Charleston, South Carolina.
My grandson, Eddie just got married about a year ago
who graduated from Ohio State, Magna Cum Laude.
And he and Emily just just moved down from New York.
He wanted to try the improv comedy type.
That's what he did a lot of at Ohio State.
But now I think he feels he's
growing up and he's going back to law school.
He just got accepted to Emery Law School.
So Emily got a job
with Wynette County Schools going to teach special ed.
She teaches special needs children,
school over in Buford.
Then my grandson Corey
just graduated from Clay High School up in Toldo,
Ohio, where my son Jeff and divorced.
But Corey was valedictorian president
of the senior class.
Was offered a full ride scholarship
to play soccer at Ohio State,
but accepted a academic scholarship to Ohio State.
He's going to proceed a law degree.
He's going to major internal international business.
What my parents went through,
my father lost his whole family.
He lost 15 sisters,
his mother, his father,
brother in laws, cousins,
everybody were killed at Majdanek.
Right after my dad escaped Lublin,
he found out that the whole Jewish population,
pretty much of the town of Lublin were taken to
Majdanek which is outside of Lublin and gassed.
My mother, again, her family,
her brothers and her parents were
taken to outside of Kyiv
and Babiar where they were made to dig
their own grave and
were lined up and shot in the back of the head.
So what they went through,
my father was determined when he escaped,
out of out of Poland and he and my mother
fought and did whatever they
could in resistance and
were determined that their family just was not going
to become a statistic or
become a victim and got us to safety,
got us to the United States.
I was able to grow up,
go to school, get married,
have children, have grandchildren.
And there was six million Jews,
just because they were Jews were not
given that opportunity because one man decided that
a group of people
because of their religion were not of living.
And but my father
was not going to be part of that six million.
I felt that he gave me the opportunity
to have a family and in turn able to contribute.
I contributed as being a salesman for over 40 years,
and now speak at the Holocaust Museum and
I just want to make sure
that the kids today don't forget what happened.
>> Thank you, Mr. Grinblat.