By Robyn Eisenstark
“How maddening it sometimes was to be human,” said Samuel Oliner, recalling the day he found out how his family was murdered by Nazis. It was Simcha, a Jewish man who had escaped the mass killings, who told Samuel what had happened to his family at Garbotz; they were victims of a mass killing of Jews by the Nazis who invaded Poland in August 1942.
“From what I could piece together from his garbled sentences, he was one of those Jews taken to Garbotz,” Oliner recalled. “There was a big hole waiting there for all those Jews. The busy hands that dug it must have worked a long, long time. The Nazi butchers couldn’t shoot the Jews and bury them fast enough. Our people lay in that hole, dead or wounded. Some had just fainted from shock. The Nazis couldn’t bury them fast enough, so over these people, many of them not even dead, the butchers poured a chemical.”
Looking into the face of terror is nothing new. People have been killing each other since the beginning of time. But why do tragedies like the Holocaust occur? Does anything good come out of the evil of war? I had the opportunity to speak to an extraordinary man who has seen the face of terror. Samuel Oliner is a professor of sociology at Humboldt State University, who as a boy escaped the hands of death in Poland. Since then he has dedicated his life to studying and teaching people about altruism and compassion in an effort to understand why people choose either good or evil.
“You must remember what the Nazis have done to us. We must never forget the dead are watching us. But first of all, you must live. You are very young . . . and perhaps that is to your advantage. Good Luck.” Simcha’s words had flowed freely into the heart of Samuel and have stayed with him. Eleven million people were murdered in concentration camps and extermination camps, with a total of 50 million people losing their lives in World War II. According to Jacob Lestchinsky of the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish population in Poland before the Holocaust was 3,250,000, leaving only 200,000 survivors after the atrocity. Samuel Oliner survived the mass killings in Europe and lived to tell his story so that we may never forget the Holocaust.
In 1940, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, commanded Jewish people to leave their homes and move into prescribed towns (ghettos). Anyone who did not obey the order within four days would be shot. Samuel was not able to stay at the farm where he and his siblings had been raised by their grandparents. He went to the Bobowa ghettos with his family. They were forced to live in a small room. The only furniture was a wooden table and an old mattress. The smelly outhouse in the back of the house had to be shared with other people in their ghetto. Each Jewish home was marked by blue paint on the window so it would not be mistaken for a gentile home. Samuel had a unique “advantage” over his family - he looked like a Catholic boy. He was able to go in and out of the ghetto, although fear of being caught was always in the back of his mind. Garbage and human waste were piled everywhere. Hungry, naked children wandered through the ghetto, many of them suffering from lice infestation, typhoid fever, diarrhea or dysentery. To add to the horror, young Nazis would drive through the ghetto in their jeeps, shooting off rifles and chasing people.
“Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) gathered Jews and drove them to the town square, where they loaded them in army trucks and drove them to pre-dug mass graves in the forest and killed them.” Samuel vividly describes memories of his experiences in his book “Narrow Escapes,” and is still haunted by them.
Samuel lived with his family until Aug. 14, 1942, when the extermination began. Ester, Samuel’s stepmother, said to him, “Antloif mein kind und du vest bleiben beim leben.” (Run, my child, run away so that you will save yourself.) Her final words to Samuel were, “ Go anywhere. Hide. Hide. Hide. They’re killing us all. I’m sure of it now. The trucks are taking people from the marketplace to unknown places of slaughter. - Shmulek (Samuel) ... I love you. I know God will protect you.” Samuel found strength in her words and found refuge at the home of Balwina, a family friend.
Out of the kindness of her heart, Balwina saved Samuel’s life by taking him in and giving him advice. Balwina gave him a new identity, Jusek Polewski. She taught him Polish prayers and sent him out to the nearby villages to find a job. At 12 years old, he took on his new identity and found a job as a cowhand for the Padworski family. Samuel lived in constant fear that the Padworskis would discover that he was Jewish. Many Jews had escaped the ghettos and were being hunted by Nazis. One day he became fearful when he saw the face of a familiar man. Simcha had almost called Samuel’s name , but was told that Samuel’s new name was Jusek. He told Simcha to hide in the woods and he would bring him food that evening. Simcha told Samuel about what had happened to his family at Garbotz — that they were massacred.
Samuel lived in constant fear of being discovered until 1945, when the war ended. The Padworskis never found out that he was Jewish, and soon he left them to live with a Jewish man named Peller, the leader of the surviving Jews in Gorlice, Poland. Samuel helped him build a memorial for the Jewish people and his family. The monument has the following inscription: “In this mass grave rest nearly 1,000 Jews from Gorlice and Bobowa: Victims of Hitlerian Bestial Slaughter on August 14, 1942. The erection of this monument on this holy ground was done by Nachum Ormianer and Jakub Peller, the chairman of the County Jewish Committee of Gorlice.”
 |
One of Oliner’s books shows the author during his youth in Poland.
|
At 15, Oliner moved to a displaced person’s camp in Germany and in 1945, to England along with 2,000 other orphans who were transferred by the British Jewish Refugee Committee. Finally, in 1950, a relative helped him come to the United States. Less than one year later, Oliner was drafted to the Korean War, where he was assigned to watch after the Chinese and North Korean POWs. After the Korean War, Oliner became a U.S. citizen and married Pearl, who is an HSU professor emeritus of education and a collaborator with her husband on books and at the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute. With the benefit of the GI Bill he got a B.A. at Brooklyn College, earned his M.A. at San Francisco State and got a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley. Soon thereafter, he became a sociology professor at HSU, and the Institute began.
As I sat in Oliner’s office and listened to the accounts of his life, I couldn’t stop staring at his soft hazel eyes - windows to the world. His eyes told his story and took me to Poland, where I saw Samuel, the young social scientist, curious about the world, living in a land of chaos. I look at the eyes that are no longer able to shed a tear for the horrible memories of his past. “My experiences have motivated me to try and understand the nature of good and evil,” said Oliner.
In the late 1970s, there was extensive denial of the Holocaust. He was so outraged that he began a class about the Holocaust at HSU. Students discussed the dates and names of events during the Holocaust and discussed why it happened. In one of his classes, a German woman came to Oliner in tears. She told him she had to drop the class, that she could not stand the guilt of what “her people did to his people.” He was moved by her words and told her it was not her fault. The Holocaust was a “cancer” in German politics and Nazi ideology. This incident led to their friendship. The woman continued studying the causes and effects of aggression and received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The incident was a pivotal point in Oliner’s life. He wondered if anything good came out of the evil of WWII. He thought of the kind acts from some people and thought of Balwina, his savior. She owns a soft spot in his heart. The rest is history.
Oliner has authored and co-authored several books and articles about altruism and compassion and is currently working on a book called “Heroes Among Us: Faces of Heroism and Altruism.” There are several graduate students who assist Oliner and the institute with research. Graduate student Farnad Darnell said, “Sam’s putting a positive spin on what could be a negative world . . . he’s trying to make the world a better place. It’s not about this ‘ism’ or that ‘ism,’ it’s about human kindness. It’s about love, it all comes down to love.”
Oliner is well respected by his colleagues, which was apparent when I went to his office and saw people hard at work. It was refreshing to see them so dedicated. The tragedy that happened on September 11 opened the eyes of the American people to the good and evil of this world. Amidst all the chaos, many ordinary heroes helped save the lives of others. Samuel is a witness of what can happen when the power is in the wrong hands. That is why he and so many others are hard at work trying to educate people about the benefits of being a bystander who takes action, and the consequences of indifference.
|
