Not Your Average Supermarket Guy

A Holocaust survivor recounts an encounter with an S.S. soldier in a black uniform who was overseeing the group of Jewish laborers the survivor toiled with during World War II. ‘He started to get nasty with us,’ the survivor says, ‘and he pulled his gun out and said, ‘If it happens again, I’m going to shoot you guys.’ One of us’a big guy, athletic’he took that gun out of the soldier’s hand and turned it around on him. He told him, ‘You say that one more time and I’m going to shoot you!’ No, this is not a tense scene from ‘Defiance’ or ‘Valkyrie’ or any of the other WWII dramas currently playing in theaters. This is a scene from the life of Fred Wolf, the popular, avuncular employee working at Gelson’s market on Via de la Paz who managed to survive the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. December 2008 was particularly busy with Holocaust-related film releases’add ‘The Reader,’ ‘Good,’ and ‘Adam Resurrected’ to the aforementioned films’and the year itself was a particularly active one for Wolf, who, last fall, was invited to Germany by the City of Frankfurt for a celebration at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. The college’s humanities building used to house I.G. Farben, the chemicals company that created the deadly Zyklon B used in concentration-camp gas chambers, for which Auschwitz prisoners’Wolf included’worked as slave labor. Wolf was among other Holocaust survivors from all over the world invited to partake in the positive rebirth of the former I.G. Farben Building, re-dedicated as the Norbert Wollheim Memorial. Wollheim (1913’1998) was a fellow forced laborer for I.G. Farben at the construction site in Auschwitz. In 1951, he filed a suit against the conglomerate seeking compensation. On a lunch break at the Gelson’s patio, over some of the market’s Hungarian goulash and a bottle of Pellegrino, Wolf tells the Palisadian-Post that he brought his girlfriend, Calia Mintzer, to Germany for the 10-day visit, where he was reunited with people he worked with during the war. The Frankfurt event attracted media coverage, including a human interest spot on ABC’s ‘World News With Charles Gibson’ that focused on Wolf. ‘They came to Gelson’s with their camera and they filmed me bagging groceries,’ Wolf, 84, recalls with a grin. In 1999, Wolf sat down with the Post’s Susan Schell and recounted the long, strange trip that brought him to the Palisades. Manfred Wolf was 17 years old in 1942 when the Allies were at war with Germany. He worked for the German city of Paderborn, and, like all Jews under the Nazi regime, wore an ethnicity-identifying yellow Star of David on his clothing. ‘You were afraid to walk around with it,’ he recalled in 1999. ‘Sometimes you would try to hide it.’ One day, Wolf received a chilling call from his father in Cologne that he and Wolf’s mother were going to be ‘evacuated.’ Wolf would never see his parents alive again, and he later learned that they had perished in a concentration camp. ‘What was heartbreaking,’ Wolf said, ‘was that my dad fought for Germany in World War I from 1914 to 1918 in field artillery.’ In March 1943, the order came for Wolf to pack up his belongings and go to a train station, from where he was transported, over three days, to the infamous Auschwitz camp. ‘Everyone was lined up,’ he remembered. ‘They said all women and children and anyone who felt sick in this line, males 18 to 45 in another line. I was 18 and I got in that line, but I looked much younger. An SS officer walked by, carrying a horsewhip that he kept snapping against his boots. He stopped and looked me over and asked, ‘How old are you?’ I stood at attention and said, ’18.” After some tense moments, the officer let Wolf stay in the line. Survival was a brutal affair, involving constant bartering. One of Wolf’s friends, who was assigned to work in a crematorium, was himself burned alive in an oven. Wolf once found a shoe with the heel hollowed out, inside which was hidden a diamond ring, a Czech gold piece and an American gold piece. He used this unexpected booty to trade with an SS guard for ‘bread, salami and bacon’enough for a week!’ By early 1945, as the Russians advanced, the Nazis began to dismantle factories on the eastern front. Wolf and other prisoners were forced to march with little food along the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia, walking for many days across open fields in the middle of winter wearing only the thinnest of clothes. At a camp near Salzburg, dubbed Gunskierschen, Wolf recalled, ‘Someone lifted me up, and I slept on the beam [of wood, near the ceiling]. It was the first night I was able to actually sleep. ‘In the morning, when I woke up, everyone was gone. I looked out and the gates of the camp were standing wide open. I walked out and there were three or four dead German soldiers on the ground. Outside the gates stood a jeep surrounded by American soldiers. I overslept the liberation! The Americans were waving at me to come over. I fell to my knees with tears in my eyes and kissed the ground. I couldn’t believe it. I was overwhelmed to be free.’ Post-war, Wolf, after having survived two years in concentration camps, moved to the newly formed Israel, where he served in the army and air force before returning to Germany to reclaim some family property. It was there in Cologne that he met his wife, Sonia, who had escaped from East Germany. ‘It was love at first sight,’ Wolf recalled in 1999. The couple had a daughter, Rita, whom they brought to California. Today she lives in Santa Monica. Wolf also has a son, Edward, residing in Los Angeles. For 30 years, Wolf owned and ran the Cork and Bottle, a liquor store on Lincoln Boulevard. After Sonia died of breast cancer in 1993, Wolf sold his Venice store, which was more trouble than it was worth: long hours, countless hold-ups. But the boredom of retirement was worse, so on an occasion when Wolf came to town to sell some neon signs from his old store to a Palisadian, he noticed a sign on Gelson’s doors, searching for a boxer. Wolf, already familiar with the town’s Gelson’s because his late wife used to buy her pastries there, applied for the position. The market’s then-manager Ray Stockton took Wolf on. Eleven years later, Wolf says that he still enjoys working at Gelson’s. ‘They’ve been very good to me,’ he says of his co-workers. He also enjoys kibitzing with the customers who come through, from local folks to other Holocaust survivors who strike up a conversation after noticing the former I.D. numbers on his forearm. In fact, several years ago, the old Auschwitz tattoo caught the notice of some students, and Wolf wound up speaking to a class at Palisades High about his experiences. ‘The history teacher still stops by, hugs me, asks me, ‘How are you, Fred?” he says. After joining the Gelson’s team, Wolf continued to live at his residence in West Los Angeles until relocating to a condomium building in the Palisades. Around this time, he also met his current main squeeze. ‘I used to go dancing every Saturday in the Fairfax area until I got sick and tired of that,’ Wolf explains. A friend told him about a dance in Culver City, where he met Calia Mintzer the first time he attended. They recently celebrated Mintzer’s birthday with her four children at Shanghai Red’s in Marina del Rey, and Wolf adds with a proud smile that his girlfriend, an actress long involved with the Westchester Theater, ‘sings beautifully! Better than me!’ As for that spate of Holocaust-era films Hollywood released over the holidays, Wolf welcomes the discussion and wants such history to be told and retold. ‘Many Americans don’t know what really happened during the Holocaust,’ he says. ‘There’s still plenty of questions.’ So the next time you’re at Gelson’s, picking up some of that chicken tortilla soup for lunch or sampling the Dutch cheese, be sure to say hello to Fred on your way out. We’re lucky to have him around.