Never the Last Journey

I'll preface this by saying that it is impossible for me to be objective about this book. As a descendant of the Oklahoma Slaners, I went to Grodno with "Cousin Felix" and the rest of his relatives when I was in kindergarten. I saw the old synagogue, the remains of the ghetto, heard the stories. So I knew I was related to this great man, and the outlines of his story of survival, but the details were filtered through years and the inevitable distortions of family legends. This is the authoritative version, in black and white.

This is really three books in one. Felix Zandman grew up in interwar Poland, in the city of Grodno with 30,000 Jews. He lived in a luxurious apartment building, owned by his Grandfather Freydovicz, a successful show more construction magnate. His grandmother Tema was a one-woman philanthropic organization. On his father's side, Grandfather Zandman was a poor religious scholar, married to a radical feminist. His family was a microcosm of the community, full of splintering arguments over socialism, Zionism, business, and bound together by love. It was a rich, fulfilling, world. The culmination of centuries of Jewish life.

All this ended with the Operation Barbarossa, and the Nazi invasion. (milhist note: Nazi Germany and the USSR were allies for the invasion of Poland. Grodno was in the Soviet Zone, and things got better for the Jews for a year or so). The Jews of Grodno had heard how bad things were in the German Zone, but only a few believed it and had the resources to flee. The Germans invaded, and began the "liquidation" of the Jews of Grodno, a years long horror of being forced into ghettos, arbitrary beatings and execution, and mass transportation to the death camps. Young Felix survived by the skin of his teeth, dodging random death and escaping the transports by hiding and running. When the ghetto was finally liquidated, he needed some place to hide, and remembered Janova Puchalski, a Polish woman who was the groundskeeper for the Freydovicz dachas. Felix managed to walk there, dodging patrols, and found his Uncle Sender and two other Grodno jews, Mottl and Goldie Bass. They excavated a shallow hole beneath the bedroom, and for 17 months the four of them survived in darkness, with Janova smuggling down a pail of a food and up a pail of excrement. To stay sane, Felix practiced an imaginary violin, and learned math from Sender, visualizing complex equations and geometric principles in the dark.

The hole was indescribable. 17 months of darkness, almost no motion, body parasites, and fear. Sender laid down an iron law. No sex for anyone, all food shared. These moral rules took on a very concrete reality, as the bedrock of the survival of the community. Somehow, they made it through, even when the Soviets pushed back, and the Nazis requisitioned the house. After a few days, they slipped out, managed to convince Nazi patrols they were refugees from the Soviets, and survived in another abandoned cottage till the war moved past.

Part two covers the immediate aftermath of the war. Felix and Sender lived as smugglers in Soviet-occupied Danzig, helping move refugees and guns to Israel as the Iron Curtain came up. They managed to get out, taking a trainload of refugees to France. There, Felix enrolled in the Sorbonne, making up for lost time. He specialized in optical coating for stress measurement, a technique with a wide variety of engineering applications, and eventually wound up as a consultant in the United States. He reconnected with the American side of his family (relatives of Grandma Tema's sister-my people). Felix recognized an opportunity in the electronics market for very precise, temperature-insensitive resistors, and with some funding from Alfred Slaner, set up a small electronics company, Vishay, which grew slowly on the basis of technical merits through the next few decades.

The third part of the book concerns a dizzying series of corporate deals, as Felix used leverage buyouts to snatch up distressed competitors, opened outsourcing plants in Israel, and expanded Vishay to a Fortune 500 company specializing in the whole range of electronic components. And of course along the way Felxi got married, had children, got divorced, re-married, was a witness at the trial of Gestapo Officer Kurt Weise, destroyer of Grodno, and brought the Puchalski children and grandchildren to Yad Vashem to see their family commemorated among the khasidei umót ha'olám.

Subjectively, this book is five stars for family reasons. Objectively, if you're interested in the holocaust, technology, or business, it's a good read although there are more classic books in each of these areas. Still, a fascinating biography of a man who passed through immense adversity, survived, and triumphed. show less