My parents were a post-Holocaust couple.
My Father
My father, Yisrael Gringer, was born to Zionist parents in Warsaw, Poland. They supported and worked for a home for the Jews in the land of Israel. According to research I later did, I found that the Gringer family originated in the city of Łódź, Poland.
From an early age, my father was friendly with a group of non-Jews, known in Polish slang as shkotzim, who made it their cause to protect persecuted Jews in nearby and more distant neighborhoods. According to my father, they rode bikes and restored order wherever Jews were being harassed.
Unquestionably, my father was a Zionist. He supported the effort to build and defend a home for the Jews in the land of Israel.
My Mother
My mother, Rachel Katz, was born in Ivenitz, a shtetl, today located in Belarus, about 25 kilometers from the city of Vilna, today Vilnius, Lithuania.
Shtetl means small town in Yiddish.
In the shtetl of Ivenitz, Jews worked hard from Friday to Friday, and poverty was prevalent. Their wealth was education, spiritual life, Judaism, and much love for the land of Israel. The hundreds of Jewish families who lived in Ivenitz possessed deep and strong Jewish national awareness, and my mother, a strong Zionist, was a member of Ha’shomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement that supported building a home for the Jews in the land of Israel.
Both my parents have passed away, and when I think of them, I think of them in heaven.
WWII Life Track
During World War II, my father and my mother were each destined for a different life track.
My father’s family — father Leib, mother Chaya, née Lipahitz, sister Riva, brother Nachum, and brother Mordechai, who was married and a father — were forced out of the comfort of their home and placed in the Warsaw Ghetto.
My grandfather told his children to try to escape the Ghetto walls and head as far north as possible in order to reach Russian forces. At 17 years old, my father managed to escape the Warsaw Ghetto. His sister Riva also escaped and lived in Warsaw. His brother Mordechai escaped north, but did not survive.
Yisrael’s Military Track
The young “Mr. Brave,” my father joined the Polish Army under the command of General Władysław Anders. In 1942, while the force was stationed in the British Mandate for Palestine, the Land of Israel, Eretz Israel, desertion by Jewish soldiers reached massive proportions. According to Anders, 3,000 out of 4,000 men deserted.
While some deserted, others obtained permission from General Anders to depart their formations. Both groups joined veteran Jewish settlements in the Mandate for Palestine. My father was among those who deserted and needed protection from arrest by the military police. For the time being, Yisrael’s local Haganah connection obtained a new identity for him — Mr. Broshi — under which he hid for two years from the British authorities, in case they were searching for him to arrest him.
The Haganah was the main Jewish paramilitary organization in the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948.
The British government desperately needed more soldiers to fight Germany and approached the Jews in Mandatory Palestine to join its army ranks. My father answered the call and joined the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. He was shipped to Europe and assigned to an anti-aircraft unit on the shores of Belgium, where his unit was busy shooting down Nazi airplanes.
Rachel’s Holocaust Destiny
In parallel, my mother, then 18 years old in 1940 and newly graduated from high school, together with her parents, Yossef Katz and Rivka, née Gurevitch, and her only sister, Chaya, was rounded up and forced to move into the Vilna Ghetto.
When the Nazis decided to “take care of the Jewish problem” in the Vilna Ghetto, my grandfather Yossef was already assumed dead. During one of the infamous selections, the Selektzia the Nazis so often conducted, my grandmother Rivka was separated from her daughters, who stood behind her in the yard.
As my mother told me, her mother looked back at her daughters, and that was the last time they saw her.
It is believed, though not with certainty, that my grandmother was shot by the Nazis, along with 100,000 other Jews who were thrown into a large pit in Vilna that became a mass grave for murdered Jews. The two Katz daughters managed to remain inseparable throughout the Holocaust years. They spent the next five years in several Nazi labor and concentration camps and were liberated by Soviet forces on May 9, 1945.
Post-holocaust
As the war ended, and after regaining some body weight and strength, my mother headed back to Poland hoping to find surviving family members. She found none. Her sister Chaya was transferred to Germany, to a displaced persons camp.
Because she spoke several languages, my mother was recruited to work in one of the centers set up by Jewish organizations to assist survivors in finding their loved ones and, in any way possible, help them return to some normalcy of life.
In parallel, my father, still a soldier in the Jewish Brigade in the British Army, took leave and made his way to Poland in search of family survivors. Like my mother, he found none.
The Determining Meeting
In his search, Yisrael stopped to get assistance at the rescue and information center where Miss Katz was working. For Mr. Gringer and Miss Katz, both now almost 24 years old, it was love at first sight, at first glance. My father’s piercing blue eyes sank with admiration into my mother’s sad and hazy blue eyes.
The couple departed from Poland to Paris, where Mr. Gringer bought his girlfriend a fancy dress, the first dress she had owned since leaving all her possessions behind in the Vilna Ghetto. I recall my mother telling me, more than once, that wearing a dress made her feel human again, a worthy person, a woman.
Yisrael and Rachel were already madly in love. Mr. Gringer had to return to base to officially end his military service. Ironically, because he was late returning from leave, he was punished and detained, while my mother remained in Paris waiting for him. Since my father could not make it back to Paris, he sent his closest friend instead to see to his fiancée’s well-being.
Destiny: The Land of Israel
Before his departure from Europe back to the British Mandate for Palestine, Eretz Yisrael, Yisrael Gringer arranged for Rachel Katz to receive passage on the ship Biria, loaded with Holocaust-surviving Jews. The ship was headed for the refuge land, still under British Mandatory rule.
On June 22, 1946, a ship carrying 1,086 Jewish survivors left Sète, a small French port west of Marseille. By the time it arrived in Haifa on July 2, 1946, it was called Biria. It was one of many ships that illegally brought Jewish Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine.
The ship Biria, carrying 400 women, 20 children, and the rest men, all war survivors, was spotted by reconnaissance planes and intercepted by British naval units on the high seas.
The Biria was the last vessel carrying Ma’apilim, Jewish immigrants, to arrive and offload while defying the British White Paper restrictions on Jewish immigration. Upon arrival in Mandatory Palestine, the passengers, among them Rachel, were taken off the ship and detained in the British internment camp at Atlit, in northern Israel.
The next group of Jews who arrived illegally to those desired shores were denied entry and sent to British internment camps in Cyprus and other locations.
Establishing The Kibbutz
Kibbutz Lehavot Ha’Bashan is located at the foot of the Golan Heights, near the former Syrian border, in Israel’s Upper Galilee region. Yisrael, a member of the fledgling kibbutz core group charged with preparing the kibbutz for habitation, was working to ready the rocky ground so buildings could be erected and fields cultivated. The women stayed behind, living in a tent camp near Hadera, in central Israel, by the Mediterranean shore.
Forming Togetherness
Upon her release from the Atlit internment camp, Rachel joined Yisrael’s kibbutz core group.
Yisrael Gringer and Rachel Katz made a couple ripe for marriage. They both left their Holocaust sorrow behind and joined together for a promising future.
As a funny anecdote, my parents wanted to marry right away, but the kibbutz could not afford a proper wedding, not even the ceremonial glass the groom breaks under the chuppah. With six couples waiting in line to marry, and some of the women, including my mother, already pregnant, the kibbutz finally rose to the task and arranged a six-couple wedding ceremony.
Seven months after Rachel and Yisrael married, I was born. It was August 1947, eight months before David Ben-Gurion declared Israel a sovereign state.
More than 80 years after World War II ended, the Holocaust still leaves my family painfully lean in number.
Yet the end of World War II also brought about the union of two very special people, Rachel Katz and Yisrael Gringer, my parents, whose memory I keep deep in my soul.
Editor’s note: This is a revised and expanded version of a story first published in NewsBlaze on April 24, 2014.
