Adding up life’s many gifts

Robert Geminder has told the story so many times, it almost sounds like he’s reading a script when he shares his memories with me.

I was born in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1935. My father was very wealthy and owned many apartment buildings. Our family of four lived very well and had a very good life.

And then, in 1939, the Gestapo came.

What happened after that, no amount of rehearsing can soft-pedal or tame.

His Holocaust story is not a tale of death chambers and concentration camps. His family, Polish Jews, survived years of Nazi cruelty, but escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz and made their way to America — all before he turned 13.

Geminder wields the memories as a reminder that the unthinkable happened “in our lifetime. And before long, everyone who was there and can tell you about it will be gone.”

He saw the horrors through the eyes of a child: He was 4 years old when his family was rousted from their apartment and forced, with hundreds of other Jews, to relocate to a city near the Polish border.

Two years later, his father died of a heart attack as he tried to barricade their apartment during a blitzkrieg by German forces. Five months after that, Nazis stormed the city, rounded up Jewish residents and herded them to the local cemetery.

“I was only 6,” Geminder recalled, “and I had to crouch and watch as 12,000 people were executed and pushed into mass graves.”

Those who survived — including his mother, brother and grandmother — were forced to live behind locked gates in a Jewish ghetto, tormented and brutalized daily.

A year later, Geminder’s mother masterminded their survival, smuggling the boys out under her skirt when she was allowed to leave the ghetto for work.

“Ten days later,” Geminder said, “the Nazis killed everyone who stayed behind,” including his grandmother.

His mother bribed a Gentile family to take her sons, with the deed to an apartment building. She retrieved the boys months later, bleached their hair blond and tried to pass the family off as Christians. Their mother bartered for tobacco and the boys rolled cigarettes and sold them on the streets outside Warsaw.

When the war ended, they went to a displaced persons’ camp, then came to the United States in 1947 to live with family members in Pittsburgh.

From there, Geminder’s life is the quintessential story of immigrant success:

An engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon; a stint in the Army; marriage to a pretty girl he met at a fraternity party. He and Judy Strauss moved to California and had three children. He rose through the ranks at Hughes Aircraft; they bought a home in upscale Rancho Palos Verdes.

But something was missing, and it took Geminder almost a lifetime to find it.

Now, 67 years after he survived the infamous Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Geminder spends his days in what some might consider another sort of ghetto — a classroom in inner-city Los Angeles — where he passes along what he knows, about mathematics and survival.

::

The principal at Opportunities Unlimited Charter High School in South Los Angeles has a litmus test for the teachers she hires. She looks for more than book smarts and pedagogical skills. She thought Geminder, a newly minted teacher at 74, just might be a good fit.

“My teachers have to care about these kids. And I felt that from him,” Angelique JacquesMarcoulis told me when I visited the Vermont Avenue campus this week.

The 5-year-old charter meets in a church, has 160 students and a social justice theme. Geminder, she said, is a living link to the suffering that injustice brings.

I can’t vouch for how good a teacher he is. When I visited his class on Thursday, the formulas scrawled on the board looked like gibberish to me. But then it took me three tries to pass high school trigonometry.

The students in his trigonometry class seemed as fluent in the language of math as their teacher. They were correcting each other and calling out answers, all over the noisy whir of four spinning fans trying vainly to cool the sweltering classroom.

This is Geminder’s third year at the school. He teaches algebra, geometry, calculus and trig. Almost every ninth-grader who enrolls at the school comes in with “below basic” math skills. So test scores are abysmally low but climbing, and higher than those of surrounding schools.

This year, Geminder has 15 students and a tutor in each class. “They come into my class saying ‘I hate math,’” he said. “At the end of the semester, they walk out believing they can handle this; knowing they have accomplished something.”

::

Before he went into teaching, Geminder spent years traveling around California, sharing his Holocaust memories with students. He liked piquing their interest in history, and enjoyed the celebrity.

“Kids wanted to shake my hand, take pictures with me,” he said. He kept every packet of thank-you notes their teachers made them send.

But there’s one memory that stands out, he said, when I asked what led him to return to college for a teaching credential at 70.

He was telling his Holocaust stories to a tough crowd at a rough high school.

He remembers one kid in particular, who hardly seemed to be listening. “Black kid, in a leather jacket, with his feet on the chair in front of him.”

Geminder finished and headed for his car. He heard footsteps approaching as he crossed the campus lot, and turned to see the boy in the leather jacket running up fast behind him.

Face to face, the boy reached for Geminder’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for telling your story,” the teenager said. “It was such an honor to hear you.”

At least that’s how Geminder recalls it. And these are his memories, after all.

That encounter made him think about how much he had in common with kids like these, beginning with a resilient, resourceful single mother.

He realized that his life was more than a history lesson; it was a mirror of the sort of challenges faced by many families in Los Angeles. His stories resonated beyond age and race because they carried themes familiar to immigrants, outcasts and refugees.

Geminder remembers the postwar taunts of German boys shouting, “Jews should go to Palestine!” He knows what it feels like to arrive in this country, a 12-year-old who speaks no English and has never been inside a classroom.

And his students, from poor neighborhoods and broken homes, know what being an outsider means. In Thursday’s class, Geminder shared a bit of his Holocaust story.

He drew a diagram of the gated enclave where his grandmother was killed, and asked if students knew what a “ghetto” was.

“Yeah,” one girl called out. “It’s like the projects.” Some of her classmates laughed. But their teacher didn’t smile back. It was time to move on to math.

sandy.banks@latimes.com