David Karmi

David Karmi is a Transylvanian-born, Jewish-American real estate developer, home builder, business executive, philanthropist, author, and survivor of the Holocaust including three concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto. He has contributed his story to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.

Karmi became the director of The Treeline Companies in 1994 and has been a builder since 1980. He has built hundreds of private residences, commercial office buildings, and condos in Long Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island.

Childhood to World War II
David Karmi was born in Halmeu (Halmi), Satu Mare County, Romania, in the historical region of Transylvania, at the dawn of the Nazi anti-Semitic movement in Europe. He grew up in a devout orthodox Jewish family with his mother, Lea; his father, Gabriel; and seven brothers and sisters: Ilana, Rachel, Armin, Mendu, William, Moses, and Irene Weiss, author of the book Life at the End of the Tunnel: A Survivor’s Story.

In the 1930s Karmi and his family moved to the city of Satu Mare, where Karmi suffered bullying and discrimination because of his religion. Karmi and his family were deported on Hitler’s order because his father was born in Poland, but they eventually returned to their home in what was now Hungary, following the Second Vienna Award. Eventually, under orders from SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, they, along with 430,000 others, were arrested as part of the mass deportation of the Hungarian Jews and sent to Auschwitz, the extermination camp.

The Death Camps
At Auschwitz Karmi was separated from his parents and his sister Irene and brought before Josef Mengele for sorting. He later learned, through word of mouth from other prisoners, that his sister was alive but his parents were most likely dead. Karmi lied to Mengele about his age so he would not be executed with other children along with the elderly and handicapped. He was strip-searched, given prison clothes, and led to a children’s barrack. Fearing he would be killed he snuck onto a work detail that was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, where he was put to work in a kitchen.

As the war in Europe began to turn inexorably against the Axis, the advancing Russian army seemed poised to invade the ghetto. However, the SS still made it a priority to fulfill Hitler’s “final solution.” They forced 4,000 prisoners working in the ghetto, including Karmi, to march to the Dachau extermination camp. Only 1,200 prisoners survived the ordeal.

After Dachau Karmi was moved to the Landsberg concentration camp, where he became infected with typhoid—an epidemic that had swept the prisoners after a death march to the Italian border. The camp was finally liberated by the 12th Armored Division of the United States Army. Karmi and the other camp survivors were taken to a small German village to recover.

After the War
After Karmi recovered from his internment in the death camps, he was transferred to a displaced persons camp. Nearby was a camp inhabited by the Jewish Infantry Brigade, who were preparing to help the survivors to get to Palestine, in violation of the White Paper of 1939. Illegal migration, known as Aliyah Bet, was the primary means of Jewish entry into Palestine. Underground organization Bricha (“flight”) smuggled Jewish holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe to Italy, where small boats tried to breach the British blockade of Palestine. Karmi went with them.

In Italy Karmi ran into a cousin who told him some of his immediate family had survived the death camps. Karmi left to look for them. He crossed into Austria with a man smuggling cigarettes over the border. In Prague he found a Romanian consulate that helped him get on a train to Satu Mare. None of his family members were there. He found Mendu and Irene in Kluj; Moses had died while serving in the Hungarian army, and Rachel had been shot and killed.

Karmi continued on to Bucharest to see his sister Ilana and his surviving brothers. Eventually he returned to Italy, where he boarded a boat with Haganah agents who smuggled him past the blockade to his final destination.

When they arrived by boat in Palestine in 1946, there was a standoff with the British, who threatened to detain any refugees who disembarked. After a week the British gassed the ship and hauled the refugees, including Karmi, onto a freighter headed for Cyprus. There Karmi stayed in another refugee camp until his passage to Palestine came through.

Karmi was sent to an orphanage near Tel Aviv, where he attended an agricultural school and made many friends. He was also trained in self-defense and weaponry by a young Ariel Sharon and was invited to join the Haganah. Sharon took David’s unit on night patrols where they exchanged fire with Arab infiltrators.

As the end of the British Mandate for Palestine approached, Karmi served with what was to become the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He was put in charge of the supply tent, where he met Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and taught students how to assemble guns. Karmi became a sergeant major and trained younger men to go to war. He was offered a spot in officers’s training school but declined it so he could return to Tel Aviv, where family and work awaited him.

Immigration to the United States, Early Career in Construction
In Tel Aviv Karmi met Gladys Wanetick, an American citizen. They married and when Gladys grew homesick, Karmi moved with her back to her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where he attended night school to improve his English and got a job building staircases.

Karmi and Gladys had a son, Glenn, and a daughter, Cora. Karmi became a private construction contractor and began to build residential homes and office buildings on Long Island. By the time their children were in college, Karmi and Gladys divorced amicably. Glenn Karmi has become a real estate investor, venture capitalist, and owner of retail stores. Cora became an occupational therapist and is the owner of Central Park Therapy in Long Island.

Real Estate Career
From 1967 through 1988, Karmi was the head of Karmi Associates, a real estate development company that focused on residential and commercial spaces in New York City, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. During that time he was responsible for the construction of 210 one-family homes, 733 apartment units, an industrial building complex at Brooklyn Terminal Market, and a 33,000-square-foot, seven-story office and retail condominium complex at 321 Broadway; the rehabilitation of the historic, fifteen-story Cocoa Exchange building in Manhattan’s financial district; and the design and construction of residential and commercial condominium space at 22 Perry Street in Manhattan, which was featured in The New York Times and the New York Post.

In 1997 Karmi became a majority owner in The Treeline Companies, whose real estate projects spanned New York’s five boroughs, including Brooklyn, as well as Westchester, Rockland, and Nassau Counties  and Connecticut.

At the time Karmi joined, Treeline was developing and managing commercial real estate and REO portfolios for Independence Savings Bank, the Dime Savings Bank of New York, the Greater New York Savings Bank, and First Nationwide Bank. The REOs included apartments, condos, retail projects, and office buildings. Later Treeline also worked with Columbia Federal Savings Bank, Phoenix Mutual Life (now The Phoenix Companies, and Emigrant Savings Bank. Treeline, with its growing expertise in the commercial real estate market, expanded to work closely with tenants that included many major businesses and government agencies such as 1-800-Flowers, Allstate Insurance, Macy’s, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s New York City Transit, the New York Public Employees Federation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the Visiting Nurses Association.

Treeline owns and manages two million square feet of commercial space in the New York tri-state area worth over $457.4 million, including five office buildings in downtown Brooklyn and nine in Nassau County, Long Island, with properties on Franklin Avenue, Stewart Avenue, Garden City Plaza, Old Country Road, Livingston Street, Montague Street, and Remsen Street.

Survivor’s Game
In 2010 Glenn Karmi contacted Arbor Books to help create his father’s memoir. In an effort to educate younger generations about the Holocaust, he geared the writing toward a young adult audience. In 2012 Karmi released Survivor’s Game. The book received a rave review from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, which called it “eminently readable and largely remarkable” and compared it to the works of Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel.