Every day Henry Greenspan would get up at 5 a.m. and go make car batteries. In the evenings, he’d work a second job as a janitor and get off at 2 a.m. Three hours later, it would all start again – for years. And he never complained. Compared to his past, working 20 hours a day was a veritable Eden.
Greenspan, who died on Sept. 28 at age 82 following a stroke, “always felt he would survive the war,” said his son, Willie. Whether he was psychic or merely supremely confident, Greenspan beat incredible odds, again and again.
Many times, he told his wife, Frieda, and son Willie about the day when the Nazis demanded that the rabbi of his Polish village of Slawatycze attend a meeting. Until his dying day, Greenspan recalled the proud rabbi striding down the shtetl’s central road in his Shabbos suit. No one ever saw him again.
Later, Greenspan and his brother, Herschel, were conscripted to build roads for the Germans. Somehow, Herschel convinced the guards to allow his little brother to go home after several days. None of the work crew ever returned.
On Sukkot in 1942, Nazi marauders began randomly pulling Jews out of their homes and slaughtering them. Greenspan’s father, Velvel, escaped to the home of a sympathetic Christian farmer, but the rest of the family was rounded up and made to march to the train depot. In the midst of the trip, the Nazis began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd. One of the bullets struck Greenspan’s mother.
Without thinking, Greenspan, his brother Nathan and two other men took off running for a nearby forest through an open pasture. When Greenspan reached the woods, he turned around and looked back — he was the only survivor.
He was reunited with his father at the Polish farmer’s house (Willie still sends $200 a month to the farmer’s children; the family were recognized as Righteous Gentiles for saving the Greenspans). Father and son joined the partisans, and, later, the Red Army, marching together into Germany where they served in a combat unit.
Six months after the end of the war, organized Polish anti-Semites broke into Greenspan’s house and murdered his father. Greenspan carried Velvel to the Jewish cemetery and buried him. He didn’t return to Slawatycze for 50 years, when he said Kaddish over his father’s grave.
He met Frieda Wrzeciono, an Auschwitz survivor, in Warsaw, and the two were soon married. After years in German Displaced Person camps, the Greenspans received a visa for the United States and set foot on U.S. soil with perhaps $2 to their name. Working the long hours mentioned earlier, Henry and Frieda saved up enough to purchase a delicatessen and, later, as many as a dozen luncheonettes and convenience stores in downtown San Francisco.
Just before his death, Greenspan and several other Polish survivors had formed an organization devoted to restoring Slawatycze’s Jewish cemetery, which was trashed during World War II.
“They’re building a gate and installing some plaques,” said Willie Greenspan. “There’s a rededication of the cemetery on May 19 of next year. I had just ordered the tickets for dad and me to go.”
Henry Greenspan is survived by his wife of 62 years, Frieda, of San Francisco, son Willie of Hillsborough, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Donations in his memory may be sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Box 90988, Washington D.C., 20090-0988; or to the American Stroke Foundation, 5960 Dearborn, Mission KS 66202.