November 28, 2007

DAILY BREEZE By Laura E. Davis

 

                                                                                                                               Text Box:     He was only 6 when he crouched in a cemetery and watched as 12,000 people were executed and pushed into mass graves. It was 1941, and Nazi snipers were gunning down thousands of Jews packed into the graveyard in Stanislawow, Poland. But Robert Geminder, his grandmother, mother and older brother survived.     "It was pure luck," he said in a recent interview. "We got to the cemetery first, so we were in the back. The 6,000 to 8,000 people that were left were told to go home when it got dark and started snowing."       Living in Rancho Palos Verdes, Geminder has many stories with a similar theme: Without a little luck, he would have died in the Holocaust. Geminder was born Aug. 3, 1935, into a wealthy family in Bielsko, Poland.                                                   

                                                                                                                                  

But four years later, their lives would change forever when Germans launched an attack that devastated their town. During

the siege, Geminder's father, Mano, was overcome by fear and stress. "We were pushing mattresses against the windows,"

Geminder said. "And my father had a heart attack at this point and died." As the Nazis invaded, the family was forced to leave.

"My mother kept telling me, `We're going to have to do a lot of walking,"' Geminder said. "We didn't take much with us.

Whatever we took, we had to carry."

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 

 

                                                            

     

                                         

                                                                       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                       

    Geminder's grandmother was left behind and was killed when Nazis purged the ghetto.

They traveled around Poland, living as Gentiles with the surname Kaminsky. They even attended church on Sundays.

In 1944, they were in Warsaw when Polish rebels tried to liberate the city from Nazi rule. After the uprising failed, the

Germans planned to eliminate the city's population, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

    Everyone was loaded on to trains headed to Auschwitz. "We, as Jews, knew what was going to happen," he said.

"We knew we were going to be killed." As they were waiting to board the train, Geminder's mother noticed that one

of the cars had an opening on top, so they made their way toward that car. When the train stopped about 100 yards

from the concentration camp, they climbed through a hatch and escaped.

   

    The family left Poland for Czechoslovakia when the war ended in 1945 and eventually ended up in a displaced

people's camp in West Germany. In 1947, they took a boat to Ellis Island and settled with extended family in Pittsburgh,

Pa., where Geminder went to school.

    He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1957 with a degree in engineering. He married his wife, Judith,

in 1959, and the couple has lived in Southern California ever since. They have three children - daughters Miriam, 43,

and Ellen, 42, and a son, Shia, 38.

   

Today, Geminder teaches science and math at St. Mary's Academy in Inglewood, where his students call him "Mr. G."

Geminder along with his mother and his stepfather - who both died in the late 1990s - have told their stories to the

Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit established by Steven Spielberg to record testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

He's also created his own Web site dedicated to his tale of survival - a feat he attributes to his parents' intelligence

and determination.

 

"They are the real heroes," he said.

 

Robert Geminder has created a Web site dedicated to his survival of the Holocaust.

laura.davis@dailybreeze.com