This account is from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war. Beginning in 1945, the Allied forces established displaced persons camps across Europe, where hundreds of thousands of concentration camp survivors and Jewish refugees reacclimated to life after the Holocaust. Some were former concentration camps with poor conditions, while others were requisitioned European villages, like Lampertheim, Germany, where Yankel Oltuski, who is now 102 and goes by Jack, lived between 1946 and 1949.
After the war, in the Jewish displaced persons camp in Lampertheim, I became known as an entrepreneur.
A fellow displaced person (known as D.P.s) sold me a five-carat diamond, which I traded to an American officer for maybe 100 packs of cigarettes, a rarity. A German doctor passing through sold me an American thousand-dollar bill. A local Greek man brought me a rough diamond. I’d never seen that, but I had it cut and sold it.
There were many Germans who came to the camp to do business. As a Jew, I didn’t think about who they were. You couldn’t. Having fled my hometown in Ukraine when the Nazis invaded, leaving everything and everyone, I learned to work with what was in front of me. In Lampertheim, that meant trading with whoever passed through. People knew there were Jewish traders living there and asked around, “Who would buy this? Who would sell that?” Everyone said, “Go to Jack.”
Everything I earned, I saved. After losing my home and being on the run, I knew that was the way to survive. A few months after arriving in Lampertheim, I married my late wife, Dora. I began courting her before the war and, having heard she was alive and in Germany, tracked her down in the camps. We were assigned to live in a requisitioned three-bedroom apartment with my father and two other young men. I hid the money in our oven because the boys never went into the kitchen — they ate in the camp cafeteria. Seldom did I spend, and there wasn’t a lot to spend on. For our wedding, I had a cobbler make a pair of shoes for Dora. This was something special.
When I fled home in 1941, I went east, not knowing where I would end up, and in Kyiv I was conscripted to the Soviet Army. In the army, resourcefulness was survival. As one of the only Jews in my unit, I had to be careful. Anti-Semitic officers would select me for the most dangerous missions. Knowing how to negotiate, how to talk to people, who to trust, when to follow and break rules saved me.
By the end of the war, I knew it was probable that my family and Dora had been killed. I’d watch other soldiers open letters from home but never received any myself. One officer, taking pity, ordered me to send 10 letters to my hometown. To my disbelief I received a response. My father had fought with the partisan resistance and, just months after the war’s end, opened a grocery store in the Polish city of Szczecin. When I found out he was alive, one kind officer gave me leave to visit. I never went back to the army; most of the time, it was a dangerous place to be Jewish.
Reunited, my father and I went to Germany to look for others who survived, to look for Dora. We hopped a train that arrived in the Soviet side of Berlin, where I tossed my army jacket and got some civilian clothes. Then we made our way to Frankfurt, where there was a D.P. camp, and finally to another one in Lampertheim, where we heard that Dora was. But I had a longer-term plan: to move to America. Where else was there to go?
In the camp, trading was survival, even though it wasn’t permitted by the authorities. Earning money meant I’d have a chance of starting over in the States. In those times, there were no universal prices, so my intuition was my business. One day, I saw a man driving a convertible on the street in Lampertheim, a BMW coupe. Oh, this was a good car. I made a deal — I paid him 1,000 American dollars for it. I was told people with cars paid the police to look away, so I did.
A German shoe factory owner who heard about the BMW approached me and offered me a truck full of leather shoes, maybe a thousand pairs, for the car. On a Saturday afternoon, he parked his truck on a side street, and I had buyers set up on site to take the merchandise, but one of the camp police — a man named Ostrowiecki — found out about the trade and tried to stop it. I had to wrestle him to the ground while the manufacturer unloaded the shoes. Ostrowiecki told the chief of police and wanted to arrest me, but the chief was friendly with me, so he said, “You know what? Give him some shoes, and we’ll forget about it.” The police weren’t bad. Everyone just wanted to earn something because they had their own plans to start over.
In our three years in Lampertheim, I had saved up enough cash to start a new life, a good life. In 1949, Dora, our toddler son, my father and I got papers and boarded a boat to America. At first, we settled in Kansas City, Mo., where we had relatives, and the first business I opened was a grocery store.
Later, we moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and there, Ostrowiecki and I played cards together. Imagine my surprise when we became neighbors in another country.
This account has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Jack Oltuski told his story to Romy Oltuski, his granddaughter and a New York-based writer and editor.
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