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Living to tell the tale

Victor Zarnowitz escaped the Nazis and survived the Gulag

By Seth Mandel

It was a rare feat to survive either the Nazis or the Soviet Gulag during WWII. Not only did Victor Zarnowitz survive both, but he did so after growing up in the little Polish town of Oswiecim -- better known by the name it took a short while later: Auschwitz.

Born in 1919, Zarnowitz -- who later in life became a world renowned economist -- had a "happy childhood" until the age of 10, when his father died of a heart attack, he told a modest audience at Borders on Manhattan's east side Sept. 25. Zarnowitz recently published a book about his life, "Fleeing the Nazis, Surviving the Gulag, and Arriving in the Free World."

Zarnowitz began attending Poland's public schools, and said the elementary and high schools offered a well-rounded education. It wouldn't be long, however, until his enjoyment at school tapered off considerably.

"But by the time I went to the upper high school and college (at the University of Krakow) I, for the first time, had to face terrible anti-Semitism," Zarnowitz said.

Anti-Semitism had a long history in Poland, he said, but with the Nazis gaining influence in the region, it became particularly vicious. For example, the schools began instituting "Days Without Jews," during which the Jewish students were expelled from their classrooms to give the gentile students an opportunity to experience a much-anticipated Jew-free atmosphere.

"Maybe Poles regarded the fact that there were so many Jews in Poland as a more important and more damaging fact than the Nazis," Zarnowitz said. "All of that changed very soon after the invasion."

In 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria -- the Anschluss. Zarnowitz had family in Vienna that suffered greatly, including one uncle who was deported to a concentration camp, where he was killed. The rest of his family in Vienna were somehow able to immigrate to America. Zarnowitz had difficulty believing just how quickly this all happened; only a year earlier he had visited those relatives in Vienna.

It was already very tense, and about to get more so in 1939 as the war started in earnest; the Nazis invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east.

The town soon to be known as Auschwitz was deserted. Zarnowitz left town on foot with his brother, mother, and grandmother, along with pretty much everyone else. The residents of the town -- and the Polish citizens in general, it seemed -- "were scared as hell of the Nazis," he said.

But his mother and grandmother were too weak to make the journey, and returned home after about a day. Zarnowitz and his brother, Tadek, continued on, pursued by the encroaching Nazi army.

"We spent 17 days on the road and we were somehow able, as a great many people did, to evade or escape the great Nazi army," Zarnowitz said.

The boys were able to get in contact with their mother to inquire into her health. She was OK, she told them, and in fact things weren't so bad in Oswiecim; the boys were told to return home to the future Auschwitz. They tried, but were fatefully unsuccessful.

Zarnowitz and the others moved east, until they were in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. You could either run from the Germans toward Stalin's men, or you could run from Stalin into Hitler's arms. Zarnowitz and Tadek chose the former. Once they were caught, they were sent immediately to the infamous Gulag.

"People who ran away from the Nazis and escaped to the Soviets were treated by the Soviets as people who came without passports, without permission," Zarnowitz said. "And so they were illegal. And without any trial or any court proceedings and so on, a great many, great many people -- we don't know exactly how many, but thousands of them -- were deported."

They were put on a train they were told would bring them to Leningrad, but the train kept going north until they were in a remote area of Soviet control near the Finland border and the Arctic Circle.

The work was difficult, but physical abuse from the guards, from what Zarnowitz knew, wasn't taking place.

"As far as I am concerned, there were no abuses and so on, I never suffered anything like that," he said. "What I did suffer was malnutrition." That's because there wasn't much meat or any fresh vegetables, or other nutritious food to eat. The prisoners were wasting away. "So we were half-starved, and starvation can cause all kinds of sicknesses."

In 1941, Zarnowitz and his brother were taken to another work camp, this time in Ili, Kazakhstan, near the Chinese border and near a large Uzbek city.

He spent three months in a hospital before he was healthy enough to go back to work. His brother couldn't even be released from the hospital.

"We started from working on the street repairing pavement, things like that -- physical work," Zarnowitz said. "It was pretty hard because we were in bad condition. But I made it and I survived it. I survived the Gulag, so it was no problem surviving Kazakhstan."

Eventually, Zarnowitz and the others were sent back to where they came from -- in his case Auschwitz, but not before meeting his wife, Lena, in Ili. They married in a small ceremony before returning home.

"It was a long, long journey both ways by train -- but much better back as a free man than before," he said.

After the wedding, they returned to their places of origin, he to Auschwitz and she to Warsaw.

Zarnowitz came home to find a chilling scene. It was similar to what the city experienced when the Nazi army approached.

"Now, coming back, the important thing was, what could you find there? The buildings were all there, [but] there were no people to do anything about it, including destroying them, or changing the residences, and so on," Zarnowitz said of the Auschwitz to which he returned. "Because there were no people. And you literally had no one to meet on coming back to Poland. Because what happened of course is that I was in trouble, but my troubles were not comparable at all to those of people who stayed in Poland."

That was the end of Zarnowitz's troubles with the Nazis and Soviets, however, and the beginning of a career as a decorated economist. Zarnowitz stayed in Poland for a while, he said, but it became more and more dependent on the Soviets. People once again tried to leave Poland.

"Most of us left either for Israel or the U.S., and I left for the U.S.," he said.

Zarnowitz did some traveling and studying, receiving a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He eventually settled permanently in the United States, and he is now senior fellow and economic counselor for the Business Cycle Indicators program at The Conference Board, an economics forecasting firm. Zarnowitz is also a professor emeritus of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Zarnowitz credited Lena, who died of Parkinson's disease in June 2000, with his level of success in the business world. She encouraged him and supported him, but she also showed him a side of humanity that he was glad to see wasn't lost for good in the war. He wrote about her in his book, and her devotion to helping orphaned children in the work camp.

"In the years of the war I had seen only selfishness and cruelty," he wrote. "Her dedication to the orphans in Ili had reawakened my belief in altruism and human kindness."