Never Forget

Robert Geminder walks with a purposeful stride onto the auditorium's stage. This won't be the first occasion he tells his story. In fact, he's actually lost count how many times he's taken the stage. When he begins to recount his real-life drama to the 600 or so high school students, he happens to notice a young man seated a few rows back. With black jeans, leather jacket, spiked hair, and earrings, he is impossible to miss. Is there any chance the meaning behind Geminder's words will actually reach him?

After almost an hour of rapt silence from the audience, a drained Geminder says, "Thank you," and walks off stage. As he is on his way to his car, he hears someone yell, "Wait! Mr. G, wait!" Mr. G, as the students call him, turns. It's the young man with spiked hair. He shakes Mr. G's hand and says, "I want to thank you for sharing your story. It really means a lot that you would go through it again for us."

A decade has since passed, but Geminder still remembers the encounter. "It brings tears to my eyes to think that this kid, this tough kid, chased me down to thank me," he says. "I was in shock."

Perhaps it's not so shocking given the magnitude of Geminder's story: Born to Jewish parents in 1935 in Wroclaw, Poland, Geminder's childhood became a horror story that today is still difficult to fathom. The Nazis were in power then, which meant that the Jewish community was in peril simply for their heritage. At the age of six, when most little boys would be playing outside with friends, Geminder was herded to a cemetery in Stanislawow, Poland, with 20,000 other Jews, including his family. It was at that cemetery where the Nazis killed all but 6,000 people. Geminder and his family were spared, because they were "lucky enough" to arrive at the cemetery in early trucks. Those who weren't killed became the work force for the local ghetto. After a year of hard labor and horrifying conditions, Geminder remembers how his mother, stepfather, and brother escaped from the ghetto after fearing everyone there was about to be killed.

The family fled to Warsaw, Poland, where they changed their name and pretended to be Catholics. They lived in Warsaw until 1945, when the Germans defeated the Polish Underground in the Warsaw Uprising. The Germans then forced everyone in the town, Polish and Jewish, to board trains headed for Auschwitz. Geminder says the train stopped about 100 yards outside of Auschwitz, and it was there that his stepfather had a plan. He lifted Geminder up over the open car, and the boy opened the door, enabling them to escape from the train to a nearby farm, where they hid under a trapdoor.

"My stepfather kept telling the other people on the train to get out because they were going to get killed, but they didn't believe him," Geminder recalls. "This was one situation where being Jewish may have actually saved our lives. We knew Auschwitz was an extermination camp, but the Polish people believed that it was a work camp," he says. Poland would lose 6 million citizens, about one-fifth of its population. Half of the dead weren't Jewish. Two years later, in February 1945, the Russians liberated Geminder's family. The Holocaust was finally over, and the Geminders had to somehow put their lives back in order. After moving to West Germany and finding a family member to sponsor them, they moved to the United States, specifically Pittsburgh, to start over.

(Continued …)

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