Holocaust survivor's wife shares his story of enduring concentration camp

Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27 and a 90-year-old woman in Lodi is keeping her late husband's legacy alive.

Lillian Greenhut's late husband, Kurt Greenhut, was a child Holocaust survivor who endured internment in a concentration camp. After encouragement from her friends, she decided to share for the first time publicly about her husband's story. 

Preparing a presentation in front of a packed room of her fellow residents at Revel Lodi, an independent living home, along with the community, she wanted to share her family's history with hopes history doesn't repeat itself.

"Soldiers come out of war with PTSD, he was 5 when the horrors in Germany started, when Hitler became chancellor, when his father's business was confiscated without compensation," Greenhut said. "He witnessed his father being beaten during Kristallnacht and being put in Dachau (concentration camp). He was later put with foster parents in Heidelberg because there was no one there. He was 11, no one there to take care of him and rounded up by the Gestapo, and put on the train, and wound up in a camp in southern France, where he accidentally found his father, pure accident."

The French resistance helped Kurt get to America.

"They helped provide feed money through various organizations into the camps and helped, they saved thousands upon thousands of lives," Greenhut said. "From the time he was 5 until he came to this country at 13, he went from one hellish thing to another and yet he always looked at life as his cup half-full."

After he arrived in America, Kurt eventually received a Masters in Political Science from Columbia University, became a teacher, and a U.S. Army veteran.

"Came after eight years of having no education, going from camp to camp. He came here at age 13 and without speaking English, he went into the public schools and graduated at 20 and got his B.A. at Tufts University, Masters at Columbia, and went on for postgraduate work at Temple University," Greenhut said.

Lillian's daughter-in-law, Donna Greenhut, was in attendance and said it's "essential" for people to stop and remember.

"Especially with the things that are going on in the world today, that if it weren't for loving, kind people, Kurt wouldn't have made it, and that it makes a difference," Donna said. "When you feel like you can't do anything in this world, you can still be kind and loving when the opportunity comes up and maybe save some people, literally if not figuratively. They looked beyond race and geography and all that and just stepped up and did the right thing and that's all you can do sometimes, is just personally to step up and do the right thing, and that's a message that needs to be told."

Lillian's father-in-law was protected by a book of Hebrew prayers in his chest pocket that stopped a bullet from killing him. She shared that very bullet along with the book with CBS Sacramento and showed his iron cross as he was a decorated veteran, thinking he would be safe in his own country in Germany. When family left the country, he stayed with his family but was treated differently because he was a Jew.

Fast-forward to today, Lillian feels uncomfortable when she goes to synagogue and said antisemitism towards Jewish people in America has gone up.

"When I go to synagogue in Stockton, there are armed guards," Greenhut said. "Why?"

She said her late husband's motto was "we should not forget."

"We are forgetting today," Greenhut said. "When you just hate someone because they're other. And I have not spoken out about this, but I felt that today was a good day to talk about what happens when we forget, when we become inhuman."

It was a message that resonated with the audience in attendance.

"It was very, very emotional and very informative," Victoria Joyce, Lillian's neighbor who lives down the hall, said.

Revel Lodi sales director Danny Chu helped Lillian put together the slideshow for the presentation, filled with her family's pictures and artifacts.

"It was quite a tremendous journey working with Lillian," Chu said. "There was a lot of things I didn't know. First of all, it's very common, everyone knows what the Holocaust is. But, to learn about the Holocaust more intimately, more deeply, from a direct personal account from Lillian, whose husband went through the Holocaust, I learned quite a bit."

Lillian also shared a poem that is displayed in Holocaust museums from Lutheran minister Martin Niemöller, which ends with "then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." 

"So, if we don't stick up, if we don't stand up and support what is right in this world, where are we heading?" Greenhut said. "What legacy do we leave for our children?"