Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 13:46:33 -0500
From: David Berengut 

I was amazed to read Joe's family story, because of its many similarities to my
own parents' story.

My mother's family lived in a small town in eastern Poland. A few days after the
German invasion of Poland, her younger brother, aged 7, was grievously injured
in the leg by shrapnel from a bomb dropped by a German fighter plane on their
town. To be closer to a hospital, her family moved to the nearby larger city of
Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine), where an uncle lived. As fate would have it, this
injury, and subsequent move, was fortuitous, because Lwow ended up being in the
Russian-occupied part of Poland, rather than their home town, which was in the
German-occupied part. At some point prior to June '41, when Germany invaded
Russia, her family was taken by the Russians, in a harrowing 13-day rail trip,
to a gulag in Russia, basically a labor camp. So while conditions were harsh,
and survival certainly not guaranteed, her family escaped the horrors of the
concentration camps and death camps.

My father, who was already an adult and had his own tailor shop in western
Poland, had 6 siblings, some of them already married. Most of them, along with
his parents, lived in Warsaw. They all perished in the Holocaust. Somehow, my
father ended up in the same gulag as my mother's family. After the war, my
parents married and ended up in a DP camp in Traunstein, near Munich, where I
was born. We lived in Munich for a few years, until 1951, when we got papers to
emigrate to Canada (the rest of my mother's family ended up going to Israel.)

Starting a new life in two foreign cultures was challenging. My parents did not
feel particularly warmly welcomed by the indigenous Jewish community. Almost all
their friends were other survivors like themselves. They used to refer to the
two classes of Jews by the Yiddish words "de greeneh" -- the greens -- and "de
gayleh" -- the yellows. For myself, my insecurity as a child, combined with the
desperate need to fit in, resulted in my being embarrassed to have friends over
to my house, lest they encounter my heavily-accented parents. It is with some
degree of shame that I recall that feeling.

Although my parents did not go out of their way to talk about their wartime
experiences, they didn't avoid it either. Over the years, I managed to glean
bits and pieces of their stories. My father wrote a brief memoir, and my brother
and I recorded some interviews on several occasions. Unfortunately, there are
still many questions I wish I had asked sooner.

It's interesting how this reunion has resulted in three distinct threads: a
recalling of interesting and amusing anecdotes from our shared school years; a
catching up on our respective lives and careers; and, unexpectedly, an opening
up among a surprisingly large number of us of shared background that was hidden
in plain sight while we were classmates. It's been a revelation, and I'm so glad
we did this.

David Berengut