He is asked to tell a story it is obvious he has told before--the story of his escape. And suddenly, the strong face of Samuel Oliner turns soft and vulnerable, his brow furrows, and his eyes look off in fear of what his mind now recollects.
Oliner is a professor of sociology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. With his wife, Pearl Oliner, a professor of education at the same university, he is coauthor of The Altruistic Personality, just published by the Free Press. He is also director of the Altruistic Personality Project, a five-year, $200,000 cross-cultural study, and research director of the Institute for Righteous Acts.
But these credentials are less important than the fact that he is a Polish Jew who, through the benevolent assistance of a Polish Catholic family, avoided capture and certain death during the Nazi occupation of Europe throughout World War II.
He runs a hand through the gray hair that once was blond. "Okay," he says, and as he heaves a deep sigh, and the tiny, book-crammed office at the college campus on California's remote north coast is transformed into a mausoleum of haunting memories. He is going back now more than forty-five years, but a witness can see--as clearly as he can see the flush on Oliner's face and the flash in his eyes--that the memories are as fresh as yesterday's.
It was the summer of 1942. Oliner was twelve, and the Nazis had occupied Poland since 1939. Now orders came for all the Jews in his southern Poland village to move to the Bobowa ghetto nearby. Life in the ghetto was no life at all--Jews were starved and beaten, barely surviving in crowded squalor. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded, and any Jew found outside the enclosure was either killed on the spot or tortured and returned to the ghetto.
Two months of ghetto life passed in a gloomy blur--in which the boy's nightmarish dreams were surpassed only by the nightmarish realities of day. Then suddenly, in the middle of the night--on August 14, to be exact--the Nazis stormed the ghetto, violently herding the Jews to the center of the village to be loaded onto huge army trucks.
Oliner recalls: "In the chaos and confusion, my stepmother [his mother had died several years before of tuberculosis] shouted in Yiddish: 'Run, my child; run away so that you will save yourself. Go, Go anywhere. Hide. Hide. Hide. They're killing us all.' Her prophetic words are burned into my memory. I turned to run and she called to me, 'Shmulek'--that's my name in Hebrew--'Shmulek ... I love you. I know God will protect you.' Those were the last words I heard from any member of my family. She, my father, my brother, my sisters, my grandparents--they and one thousand other Jews from that ghetto were taken to the woods, gunned down next to an open grave, and buried ... some while still alive."
As for the young Shmulek, still clad in his pajamas, he climbed a roof without being noticed and hid under old boards and rubbish throughout that day. When the noise and the atrocities he witnessed from his precarious perch had subsided, he climbed down, changed into some clothes he found in an empty house, and passed the night in a closet--"listening," as he remembers, "to the loudest sound: the pounding
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