Jack Pomerantz

Jack Pomerantz was born in Radzyn, Poland on May 5, 1918, during a pogrom again Polish Jews. In 1950, he settled in the United States, where he became a successful home builder. At age 79, he published a memoir of his early life and his years on the run from the Nazis during World War II entitled Run East: Flight From the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press) and written with Lyric Wallwork Winik.

Life
In Run East, Pomerantz recounts his escape from Radzyn as the Germans bombed his small town during their 1939 invasion of Poland. His parents were both shot to death in a field around Radzyn. One of his sisters, Genia, survived the war by hiding in the sewers beneath the city of Lviv in today's Ukraine. Genia was pregnant when she entered the sewers. Her husband was shot when he left the hiding place with two other men. Genia delivered a baby boy in the fall of 1943. The baby was suffocated that night with a rag because his cries threatened to expose the Jews' hiding place. The eleven Jews who survived were saved by a sewer worker named Leopold Socha. They spent fourteen months underground, not even able to stand up to their full height. Jack Pomerantz and his sister were miraculously and accidentally reunited after the war in Lodz, Poland. Pomerantz had been told that she was dead and had even been shown her grave.

Pomerantz also struggled to survive during the war. To escape the Nazi army, he fled east, into the Soviet Union, stopping first in Brest-Litovsk, where he worked digging along the Bug River to widen it for the Soviet forces. He was forced to flee again after the Germans attacked the U.S.S.R. in June 1941. He traveled from Kiev to Saratov to Tashkent to Alma-Ata, where he learned that his oldest brother, Moshe, was alive, working on a Soviet collective. But before he could reach the collective, Pomerantz was rounded up in the train station and sent to a Soviet labor camp in Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, where he cut and split wood in deep snow and frigid conditions. He escaped from the camp, hiding in a train tool box, and was able to make his way back to Alma-Ata and find his brother. After locating Moshe, Pomerantz left again for Moscow to join a Polish exile army being formed to fight against the Germans. It was as a truck driver for this army, heading west, that Pomerantz discovered the mass graves that held some of his family and friends, the Majdanek death camp, and finally the fate of his parents in Radzyn. He was with the Russian forces on the banks of the Vistula River waiting to attack Warsaw, while the Polish uprising raged in the city. He was with the Russian troops during their final assault on Berlin.

After the war, he lived in a displaced persons camp and eventually married an Austrian woman named Sylvia. His surviving brothers and sisters all settled in Israel. But Pomerantz had relatives in Brooklyn, and when the opportunity came to emigrate to New York City, he took it. Sylvia's visa was denied, and Pomerantz ended up staying in New York, getting a divorce, and marrying Nina Kibrick of Irvington, New Jersey. Jack and Nina Pomerantz had two daughters, Francine and Arlene. Jack Pomerantz died in 2000.