Holocaust Survivor Reflects on His Past

As he stood in a Florida synagogue last month eulogizing an old friend, Fred Kort, a Holocaust survivor and Los Angeles businessman, was struck with thoughts about his own mortality for one of the few times in his life.

The first time was more than 50 years ago, when Kort listened from his hiding place in a lumber shed as hundreds of Jews were slaughtered at Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp near Warsaw, Poland.

Both Kort, 77, and the man he eulogized escaped from Treblinka in 1944. Only about 15 people from the camp survived the war, said Peter Black, senior historian for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Now, only two are still alive.

“I was thinking there is less and less,” Kort said. “One of these days they will be coming to my funeral.”

As the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust is commemorated Thursday on Yom Ha’Shoah, many people are thinking similar thoughts.

“There is a tremendous concern that after this generation of survivors passes on there will be no firsthand testimony,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles. “This is certainly the final decade.”

Public Awareness Continues to Grow

In the last 20 years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the Holocaust, and a second wave of survivors came forward to tell their stories, Hier said. Through the efforts of community organizations, universities, Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, thousands of firsthand accounts have been recorded.

“For the first 30 to 35 years, we didn’t want to know what went on. Only in the last 10 to 15 years did we say to ourselves, ‘We have so much to tell. We’re not going to be here forever,’ ” Kort said.

As a major supporter of the Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kort was one of the first to preserve his story on film.

Kort also testified during the Nuremberg war tribunal. In 1946, he drew a detailed map of Treblinka that served as a reference throughout the proceedings. But after the trials concluded, Kort stopped telling his story.

He was reluctant to talk about his experience, Kort said. “I didn’t proceed because my story is such . . . it sounds unbelievable, and I don’t want to be thought of as telling fairy tales.” In the last decade, as public awareness of the Holocaust grew, Kort became more comfortable sharing the details of his past.

Surrounded by photos of family, Hollywood luminaries and politicians lining the walls of his expansive Los Angeles office, Kort also willingly shares the details of his current life. Previously divorced, Kort met his wife, Barbara, 30 years ago during a business trip to Hong Kong. Kort has three sons, one daughter and seven grandchildren.

He is chief executive of Imperial Toys, a toy manufacturing company he started 32 years ago after learning the trade from a previous employer. His attraction to the toy business, he said, may be a subconscious desire to recreate the lost years of his childhood. The company makes basic toys such as stuffed animals and make-up kits for girls.

The business, one of the largest toy manufacturers in Los Angeles, has had its ups and downs. In 1997, a factory explosion killed four employees. The same year, the company sued and was sued by Ty Inc., the maker of Beanie Babies.

As Kort begins to talk about his past, it is clear that he has told it many times before. He pauses to point out locations on a map, write down the names of Polish and German cities or roll up his sleeves to display shrapnel wounds.

Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1923, Kort, who simplified his given name of Manfred when he arrived in the United States, lived with his Polish parents and older brother and sister near Heidelberg. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family struggled for life’s necessities. There were not many Jewish families in the town and at age 10, Kort was sent to a village near the Swiss/German border to get a Jewish education.

He went on to study electrical engineering at a technical school in Karlsruhe, Germany, but was eventually forced into Poland with his family during the deportations that followed Kristallnacht, the pillaging of Jewish businesses and temples in response to the killing of a high-ranking German official in Paris.

When German troops stormed Poland in 1939, Kort’s family was separated. He ended up in the Warsaw ghetto, where he made money each day by removing the Star of David patch from his arm, crawling under a fence and reselling spices that he purchased on the street. “You had to be creative in your thinking,” Kort said of his efforts to survive.

Survival became even more perilous in 1943 when German soldiers arrived at a labor camp near Warsaw to transport prisoners to Treblinka. “We had to walk to a railroad station where they put us in a cattle car, 2,000 of us, and took us to Treblinka,” Kort said.

The trip, normally a few hours, took at least 18, said Kort. After they arrived, most were sent to the gas chambers on one side of the camp. The others waited as soldiers chose 100 to 500 to perform duties ranging from tailoring Nazi uniforms to disposing of the bodies of the 875,000 people executed at the camp.

In spite of orders to remain seated as the selection was being made, one young man sitting next to Kort stood. He was immediately shot to death.

Learning to Survive

Kort jumped to his feet. “I’m young. I’m an electrician. And I can do all this work,” Kort said quickly in German. An SS soldier, gun raised, waved him over to the group of workers. Kort became a water carrier for the camp.

A year later, with the sound of gunfire from the nearby Russian border growing louder and louder, the Germans prepared to demolish the camp before Russian forces arrived. Kort and the 500 or so remaining prisoners knew they would be killed.

Early one morning, German soldiers ordered the prisoners to “lie down, lie down, wherever you are.” Instead, Kort ran until he reached the lumber shed, where he hid for 12 hours.

Believing he had nothing to lose, Kort began timing how long it took the guards to pass his hiding place. He carefully moved lumber until he could squeeze out of the shed. Then, he dug a hole with his hands in the rain-softened earth and slipped under a fence and into the forest. He walked aimlessly all night only to stumble on the burial site of other prisoners.

Kort hid in the forest for several weeks, surviving on berries and abandoned supplies from soldiers and other refugees. He ran into Russian troops, who interrogated him for 10 days before they were convinced that he had escaped from the camp.

For the remainder of the war, Kort fought in the Polish army. His father and brother both died of starvation in the labor camps, but Kort was reunited with his mother and sister.

After years working on de-Nazification efforts in Germany, Kort arrived in New York in 1947. His background as an electrician earned him a job at General Electric, and he later transferred to California.

Later, Kort, an electrician at the Biltmore Hotel, was fixing a desk lamp for a guest. The man offered him a job at his toy company, which manufactured the device children use to blow bubbles. Kort, then 26, accepted.

After 20 years with the company, Kort struck out on his own, creating Imperial Toys, which makes more than 800 kinds of toys, including bubbles--lots and lots of bubbles.

After telling his story, Kort sits in his California headquarters filled with bubble toys, stuffed animals and quirky lavender-colored walls, reflecting on his life. “Not being really very religious, I can say, this guy upstairs must really have some special love for me,” Kort said. “I was extremely lucky.”

Though Kort enjoys providing financial support to organizations devoted to Holocaust remembrance, he wants to do more.

Like many Holocaust survivors, Kort wants to speak out when he has the chance.