Part Two

The story up to now: In Thursday's Living section, Rancho Mirage resident Earl Greif's story began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. Soon after, Greif, his parents and three siblings became refugees, hiding in the forest before being rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to the Rudki concentration camp. When the Nazis executed the camp's prisoners, Earl and his brother, Yehuda, hid in the bakery's ovens and escaped the by-then deserted camp.

The trees groaned, the branches cracked, the wind whined. Earl and Yehuda Greif, ages 16 and 10, wandered through the dense forests of Poland.

The brothers were the only inmates to escape Rudki, a concentration camp the Nazis had dismantled one April night in 1943 after murdering thousands of Jews imprisoned there. The boys had hidden in a 3-by-5-foot brick oven as their parents, Isaac abd Niriam Greif, and 2-year-old sister Devoragh we seized by Gestapo officers.

Alone now, the orphaned brothers foraged for food. Birds' eggs. Mushrooms. Berries. They walked across sharp rocks and sticks, their bare feet bleeding and swollen with infection.

In good weather they slept on the forest floor. When the rains came, Earl devised a method of twisting green branches around each other until they became soft, like rope. The brothers tied themselves to branches 10 feet off the ground so they wouldn't fall off as they slept.

Earl Greif knew they couldn't survive a Polish winter. They had to find somewhere to live and work, a way to live secretly among the enemy. After days of plotting, they came up with a plan.

"My brother's story was that his entire family was killed during the Nazi bombardment of Poland," Greif says. "His name was to be Vasil Chornof. And my story was that my mom was old and sick and so I went out to support myself. I was now Michael Kushner. We were no longer brothers, but were from different towns."

Having rehearsed their stories, the brothers left the woods and wandered separately into a village called Male Kropnik, each telling his story to Poles who would listen.

Earl found a job as a farmhand and Yehuda found work at the house of a childless couple. They stayed in Male Kropnik through the spring of 1944, meeting up regularly to keep each other abreast of developments.

Then Earl ran into trouble.

Every Sunday, all the teen-aged boys in town would take their horses to a nearby river and bathe them. At the river, the Polish boys undressed so that their clothes wouldn't get wet. When Earl wouldn't take off his clothes, suspicions were aroused.

One of the boys said, "I know why he doesn't want to take his pants off. He's a Jew, and he doesn't want to show that he's circumcised."

"I was terrified, and made a joke out of what he said," Greif says. "But a few days later, this boy and some others surrounded me near the farmhouse and tried to undress me."

His brown eyes widen with fear at the memory.

"It just happened that the man I worked for heard the shouting and screaming. He ran and chased the boys off me, and I told him they were picking on me for no reason. But I knew I was no longer safe."

Earl and Yehuda ran away.

They lived in another village under assumed names, working for different households and earning enough to feed and clothe themselves. Time passed.

One morning in 1944, Earl heard the sound of planes roaring overhead. The Russians were advancing, and he saw a chance for escape. The boys flagged down a Russian tank. Earl told their story and the boys were given a ride to Lwow, a city that lay in ruins.

There, Yehuda, too young to travel with the army, was temporarily placed in a Russian orphanage. Earl got work at a mobile hospital. Soon, he was moving with the Red Army through Poland and into Czechoslovakia and then into Germany.

In 1945, when the Allied forces were surrounding Germany, Earl received a letter from Yehuda. The orphanage, Yehuda wrote, was filled with monstrous kids who delighted in tormenting him by lighting matchsticks between his toes.

Earl received permission from the Russian commander and returned to Lwow, dressed as a soldier and carrying a gun and a certificate to travel free on any train in Russia. But when he arrived a few days later, Yehuda was gone.

"I was in a panic. I had no idea where he was," Greif says. "I was about to give up when someone told me that a group of Zionists had come looking to take Jewish children to Palestine. Yehuda had gone with them into the mountains.

"So I went way up into these mountains between Romania and Poland, and I found him and took him away with me."

Reunited, the brothers went to Czechoslovakia. A Jewish family agreed to watch Yehuda while Earl went back to his military unit in Dresden, Germany.

Earl didn't want to return to Poland, the Holocaust's epicenter, at war's end. But he didn't have money to leave Europe.

"That's when I hit on the idea of making vodka for the Russian Army," Earl says. "I knew a Russian soldier would give his life for a glass of vodka."

With wheat, potatoes, yeast, a 30-gallon drum and a trough filled with water, Earl made his homemade brew and sold it by the glass to soldiers. With the money earned, he and Yehuda traveled from Czechoslovakia to Austria, and from Austria to Munich. There, Earl studied to be a radio technician and befriended a Jewish-American GI who suggested the brothers emigrate to the United States. "Yehuda and I needed a sponsor to go to America, but we had no way to contact our Uncle Abe (Greif), who lived in Philadelphia. But this kind GI helped us to run an ad in the Jewish Forward, the Yiddish paper circulated in different American cities. Six weeks later, I got a telegram from Abe saying he was preparing the papers to bring us over."

Earl and Yehuda arrived in Philadelphia in 1947.

Though the war was over, memories of what had happened were like open wounds that bled each night.

"I'd lost my mother and father, my family, my aunts and uncles. And each evening I had horrible nightmares of being in the concentration camp. Or I'd dream I was lying in the oven while the Gestapo officers took away my mother and father and little sister.

"Sometimes I dreamt I was running from the Nazis, just running and running. And the worst thing was the fierce headaches, which never left. I was in a depression, but they didn't have drugs for that in those days."

A doctor suggested going to Arizona, so Earl left Philadelphia and headed for Phoenix. There were few jobs, so he took a train to Los Angeles. There he studied English and became a journeyman meatcutter for Safeway. He met the love of his life, Shirley Carelli, and they married in 1953.

Yehuda remained in Philadelphia, received a scholarship to study engineering at the Drexel Institute and was offered an electrical engineering job at Hughes Aircraft in Culver City.

The brothers were living close by each other now, but ever since the war ended, Earl had never given up hunting for his older sister, Rozia. He had written letters to the Red Cross and contacted various Jewish relief organizations.

Rozia had been away in school in 1939 when the Nazis came to Poland, and he had no idea whether she was alive. But he never gave up looking for her, Earl says.

He even wrote a letter to a former neighbor in his hometown, Chlopczice, Poland, to see if he knew what happened to Rozia. The neighbor knew nothing.

However, a year later, Rozia also wrote a letter to their former neighbor. "When I found out she was alive, living near Kiev and married to a Russian officer, I was overwhelmed," Greif says. "I was praying day after day for her safety."

Rozia had escaped to Russia. After the war, assuming her family was dead, she married a Russian.

Rozia and her husband paid smugglers to take them to Italy and then to Israel. From there, Rozia obtained a visa to come to the United States.

"I met Rozia at the airport in May of 1958, and we both wept," Greif says. "It was a miracle that she was alive."

Rozia ended up settling in Los Angeles and worked as a seamstress. Today she lives in Santa Monica and she and Earl remain very close. Yehuda is now retired and lives in Chatsworth.

Greif had earned his real-estate license by then and was selling houses. In 1960, he founded his own company, Reseda-based ER Properties. He worked hard and became a millionaire before retiring in 1987.

He and Shirley had vacationed in Rancho Mirage beginning in 1990. Two years later, they made the decision to move there.

The desert has a small community of survivors, but it was Greif and survivor Joseph Brandt who spearheaded the effort to build the Desert Holocaust Memorial in Palm Desert's Civic Park in 1995. Since retiring, Greif fills his days helping others. He is a benefactor of the Simon Weisenthal Museum and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is involved with other charities, including Childhelp USA, a group that helps abused children. He also is on the board of directors for the City of Hope, a Duarte-based foundation focused on finding cures for cancer.

Nearly a lifetime later, how does he feel toward Germany?

"I feel hatred for those still alive who participated in murdering my people," Greif says. "But the new generation of Germans have nothing to do with what happened."

More than 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before the war. Now, Jews there number in the thousands. Greif says he has no desire to visit the country that collaborated with the Nazis.

"It's not really safe enough to return, even if I wanted to," he says. "In the small village where I was born, some individuals occupy our house and farm. If I (went) back there, they would be afraid I'd come to reclaim my parents' property. Jews have been killed this way.

"But apart from that, the memories I have of Poland are all terrible.

"The United States is my home."