Odyssey Puts to Rest One Family’s World War II Legacy

Allen Remer is now ready to tell his 10-year-old son, Ariel, why he could not see him off to camp this summer. He wants him to know why he had to travel halfway around the world to a remote village in the Ukraine this past July to retrieve a family legacy that had been destroyed 47 years ago during the Nazi Holocaust.

“It broke my heart not to be there for him, and I know that he is still upset with me,” Allen said. “But I hope he’ll understand one day how important this trip was for our whole family.”

The trip took Allen and his uncle, Natan, 25,000 miles, from their homes in North Hollywood and the Fairfax area, respectively, to a desolate farmhouse in the forests of the eastern Ukraine to look for the remains of Allen’s grandfather and Natan’s father, then to Israel and back to Los Angeles.

Allen, 33, was able to fulfill his father Solomon’s dream of almost half a century ago of retrieving the bones of his father, Gershon, who died at 51 just weeks before Soviet troops liberated the area from the Germans in April, 1944. Gershon had to be hurriedly buried in a peasant farmer’s field in the Ukraine, where the Remer family had been hiding for 19 1/2 months from the Nazis.

“My father told me when I left Los Angeles, ‘Don’t come home without my father’s bones. I don’t care if it takes you six months,’ ” Allen said.

It is an odyssey that spans three continents, five cultures and a thousand-year history of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. It is also the story of a family that went to incredible lengths to preserve the memory of a patriarch who had basically saved the rest of his family by befriending a Ukrainian Catholic, who in turn risked his life to save four Jews and the future of the Remer family.

“What happened was a ness , or a miracle in our times,” Allen said.

It was especially difficult for Natan, who was only 12 at the time his father Gershon died on a cold March night in 1944.

For Allen, it was going back to a part of the world--Eastern Europe--where his family, along with millions of other Jews, had lived for hundreds of years; as a boy growing up in Los Angeles, he had listened to stories of his great-grandfathers, cousins and nephews who had lived there.

But in the bloodletting that occurred between 1939 and 1945, Allen’s father, uncle Natan, grandfather Gershon and grandmother Itta were lucky to find refuge with a Ukrainian peasant named Vasil Budulak in his remote farmhouse.

It was in late August, 1942, that the Remers heard that the Nazis were preparing to liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Yablonov, set up more than a year before when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and captured the small town.

Fortunately for the Remers, they had received work permits and were out of the ghetto, working in the fields, when they got the news. Thus they had the chance to escape.

Their village was 15 kilometers from where Budulak lived. Gershon, who had been a livestock seller before the war, had befriended Budulak the year before when he had sold him a much-needed horse for his farm. On the night of the purge, the Remers traveled all night until they reached the farmhouse.

When they arrived, Budulak agreed to hide them and made a place in the barn until he could hurriedly dig a trench underneath the barn, 7 feet by 6 feet, barely deep enough to stand in.

“When it was completed, we climbed in and stayed there for 19 1/2 months and only left once to bury my father in the middle of the night in the open field,” Natan said.

During that time, Budulak brought them food and blankets to keep them warm, but he never told his brothers or sisters about the Jews he had hidden.

“He only told his wife because he was probably afraid that they would tell the Nazis,” Natan said.

One day in April, 1944, as the Soviet army was advancing, Budulak came to the Remers and told them to flee toward the Russians because they would be safe there.

“We didn’t have time to go to my father’s grave because the Ukrainian collaborators were looking around for Jews, so we fled,” Natan said.

They met Soviet troops and spent the rest of the war in the Soviet part of Eastern Europe. In 1949, Solomon, Natan and Itta Remer made their way to Los Angeles.

“The day we departed Europe, Solomon and I made a vow to return to that desolate farmhouse one day when things were safer and get the remains of my father,” Natan said.

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Natan and Solomon wrote letters to Budulak and his family and sent them packages of clothing and food. But because of the Cold War, they never received a response.

Then, two years ago, Solomon wrote another letter to the Ukrainian family. To his surprise, he received a response from Budulak’s son, Petra, now 61, who was a boy when his father hid the Remers.

With glasnost in full bloom, the Remers kept writing the family about their desire to retrieve the remains of the buried Gershon.

“One day this past May, my father saw an ad in the Jewish Press in New York about a man in Israel who specialized in getting Jewish bodies out of Eastern Europe for burial in Israel,” Allen said.

The Remers contacted the man--Moshe Spiegel--and they agreed to his price. Spiegel was able to get a visa in one day--it usually takes three weeks through official channels--for them to enter the Soviet Union.

On July 4, a Thursday, Allen and Natan, 59, flew to New York, where they were to meet a man they were told would be reading a Yiddish newspaper in the main terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport. The man was to give them tickets and a flight plan to Eastern Europe.

They met the man, who identified himself only as Elbaum, and he proceeded to tell them the do’s and don’ts for traveling into the Soviet Union.

They flew out of New York on Thursday evening and arrived in Amsterdam on Friday, then flew to Budapest that afternoon. They checked into the Royale Hotel and stayed there Saturday. In the evening, a driver was to meet them to take them into the Soviet Union.

But instead, Spiegel flew in from Israel and met the Remers. He told them that the driver had deserted them.

“It seemed like everything was going against us,” Allen said.

That night, Allen, Natan and Spiegel went to a synagogue in Budapest for services. There, Spiegel noticed someone who looked familiar: It was his mother’s cousin, someone he hadn’t seen in years. The man, in his 70s and able to see with only one eye, had been a bus driver. He listened to the plight of Allen and Natan and agreed to take them over the border.

They drove off in a Soviet-made Lada, at 4 a.m. Sunday and arrived that evening at Chusta, a village in the Ukraine. There, a forensic pathologist named Mendel Glazer was to examine the bones for authenticity. Glazer had already contacted Petra that the Remers were coming.

But before they could get to the farmhouse to start digging, the Remers had to get a permit from a government official in another town.

“In the Soviet Union, you need to get a permit even to take out skeleton bones from a grave,” Allen said.

They were there at 6 a.m. Monday, waiting for the official. He finally showed up and, with the help of a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, they got the permit.

By 8 a.m., they arrived at the farmhouse and met Petra. They hugged and cried and reminisced.

For Allen, to be there after so many years was like a journey back in time. And to his astonishment, the place still had no indoor plumbing or electricity.

“I felt like I was in 19th-Century Russia,” he said.

“Before we started digging,” Natan said, “we asked Petra if anything had happened in the area of the grave from 1944 until 1991, and he told us that no one had gone near the desolate area.”

Now the question was where to start digging. Before Allen left home, Solomon, 64, had told him that he remembered burying Gershon under a little tree in the fields. Nearly half a century later, Allen surveyed the land and saw a number of large trees.

“I picked up a shovel and starting digging for 20 minutes by one of the trees,” Allen said.

But for Natan, the memories were too painful. He could not even bear to stand nearby.

“It brought back some painful memories of the war of being hunted down because we were Jewish,” Natan said.

At that point, Allen and Natan went to pray. Three Russian workers, whom they had hired and brought with them, continued digging.

“I never prayed with so much meaning before than at that moment,” Allen said.

Within 1 1/2 hours, one of the diggers found a bone, then another, and Glazer identified them as those of Gershon.

“We also found the gold crown that he had in his teeth,” Allen said, “and the whole body, including the toes.”

By the time they had finished retrieving the skeleton from the grave, it was 4 p.m.

“We were so jubilant because against all of the odds, we found the body,” Allen said.

Instead of waiting, the Remers put the remains into a metal container and headed toward Budapest. Near the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, there were miles of cars in line waiting to get into Hungary. But the Remers’ driver knew the border guards and for a few cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, they were waved through.

When Allen got back to the hotel in Budapest that Tuesday morning, he called Solomon in Los Angeles and told him that “we got the whole body.”

His father collapsed when he heard the news. But he recovered quickly and immediately began making plans to fly to Israel for the burial.

That Tuesday night, Allen and Natan boarded a flight to Israel and arrived in Tel Aviv at 3 a.m. Wednesday. Solomon flew in from Los Angeles, and they had the traditional Jewish funeral service that day.

Allen’s grandfather was buried next to his wife Itta in a Jerusalem cemetery.

Allen said that each year since his grandmother’s death in 1983 in Los Angeles and burial in Jerusalem, he and his father had made a pilgrimage to her grave site. And each year, they pondered what they would do if someday they retrieved Gershon’s remains. There would be no place to bury him, they said, because Itta’s grave was the last in a line bordered by a cliff.

“But when we went to bury my grandfather, we found that there was an extra spot that just appeared all of a sudden,” he said. “It was a miracle.”

When he got back to his home in North Hollywood on July 11, Allen tried to explain to Ariel what had occurred and why he had to go. But the 10-year-old was still disappointed that his father had not seen him off to camp.

“One day,” Allen said, “he’ll understand what happened and how this will affect our entire family for the rest of our lives.”