By Donna Lane

His story is not pretty, yet there is a certain beauty in it. It is about a man who survived the Holocaust. A man who lost most of his family, but who late in life was able to form a new one. It is a story about hope and about coming to America. It is about Aron Greenfield, an inspiration, who with his wife Martha, owned Brenner’s Children Shop, in Norwood Center, for 49 years and who willingly shared his story hoping those who heard it would be inspired to continue telling it and teaching others.

 Pictured: Aron tells his story to Troop 89 in Medfield on 9/29/22. According to Jim Hatch, you could hear a pin drop for 2-1/2 hours as they listened to Aron & Martha talk about the Holocaust. (Photo provided by Jim Hatch)

Aron Greenfield was born in Dukla, Poland, in 1926. He died unexpectedly, but peacefully, at his only daughter’s home in Maryland, on September 26, 2022, the first day of Rosh Hashanah during a holiday nap, surrounded by the people who loved him most.

This is his story. 

Aron lived in Poland, about 20 km from the German border in a small town of Szczakowa, near the city of Krakow, with a population of 8,000, 2,000 of whom were Jews. He was familiar with the propaganda being broadcast into Poland and the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune.”

His memory was clear and sharp at 88 when he told me this story. He was only 13 years old when, at 2:00 a.m., his home was invaded by soldiers telling everyone to get out and clear the streets of snow to make way for the soldiers. His parents, Orthodox Jews, and their nine children were driven out into the cold. If that wasn’t enough, he watched as the soldiers beat his father and shaved his beard for sport. It was September 1, 1939.

His family was put on half rations. His father and older brothers were sent to work camps. He was the oldest male left behind. By the end of the winter of 1940, he was pressed into labor, forced to carry 12 bricks on his back, up and down stairs, to assist the renovation of a building the Germans would use as headquarters.

What was left of his family lived in a Ghetto, a part of the city where Jews were required to live. Three families occupied three rooms. 

In 1941, Greenfield was sent to work in a tannery, and in 1942 sent to another concentration camp in Poland. Those who were not headed for a camp to work, especially women and children, were sent to Auschwitz; some to be put to work, others to be put to death.  Aron said that each time he was sent to a new camp he had to learn how to survive in that camp. Workers were given two slices of bread per day, barely enough to live on. If you weren’t careful, your food would be stolen.

When a particular job was done at a camp, the workers would be lined up and culled according to how strong they looked. By Camp #5, Aron was tired and weak and could hardly walk. It was extremely cold and he had to sleep in a warehouse. 

“I have no idea how I survived,” Greenfield said.

In 1944, he was sent to another camp where they made munitions. His job was to fill bullets with powder. Unlike the other workers, the Jews were given no gloves or masks and they were given very little food.

At 17, he was moved again to a camp in Gorlitz. 

“It was a terrible camp,” he said.

It housed about 6,000 people. 

“We walked seven miles to work each day,” Greenfield said. 

By the time he was 19, Greenfield was in his ninth concentration camp and was forced into a Death March – a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives with the intent to kill, brutalize, weaken, and/or demoralize as many as possible. 

In April of 1945, with the war over, he looked for his family. He found one sister, Sala, in the town they came from. None of the others had survived. He spent the next three years in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria, near Salsburg, where, gratefully, he received three meals a day and was able to read books. His formal education in Poland had stopped at 6th grade, so he was anxious to educate himself. He read a lot about the history of the United States and decided that’s where he wanted to live.

He put his name on a list of people who wished to go to America. He had a cousin in New York that guaranteed they would be responsible for him. Through Jewish agency help, he arrived in New York in January of 1949, stayed several months, and then settled in Boston.

He lived in Dorchester for three years with his sister, her husband, and their young daughter, taking work wherever he could and always reading, studying, and learning English.  In 1953, he started his own business as a “custom peddler,” selling soft goods door-to-door. In 1954, Greenfield became an American citizen. 

In 1969, while on the road peddling, he met Martha who was also born in Poland (and also with an interesting history). In January of 1971, they were engaged. On May 1 of that year, Aron was shot. What irony! He survived nine concentration camps and a Death March only to be shot in a hold-up in Roxbury. Despite his injuries, he and Martha were married in June and spent eight months recovering from his gunshot wounds.

Two years later, Aron bought Brenner’s Children Shop and slowly built up the store’s inventory. It was a long time getting to Norwood, but he and Martha became a mainstay of the town, and for 49 years “dressed” hundreds of children for special events, like bat mitzvahs, First Holy Communion, Boy and Girl Scouts.  

During our interview in 2014, Aron said, “I love this country. You can be anything you want to be here! And you can do anything you want.” He worried about the youth of today and the fact that that they want so much in the way of material things. He advised “don’t buy what you can’t afford.”

 He said he took nothing for granted and he worried about his grandchildren. His advice to young people was to “Read the front page – not just the sports pages of the paper so you know what’s going on.” With everything happening in the world today, it is still remarkably sage advice.

Aron’s daughter, Nadine, said that her dad was “a lover of dancing, good music, dark chocolate, cake, coffee, listening to the news, talking politics, and washing dishes. He was funny, young at heart and full of energy. He was an incredibly devoted husband, father, and grandfather, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for his family.” 

No chronicle can adequately detail all of the events and indignities that Aron survived. It was Aron’s hope that people be aware, watchful, tolerant and kind to one another, because you never know what is or has gone on in the lives of others.

Norwood residents are thankful for the many years Aron and Martha served the community through Brenner’s Children’s Shop and Aron’s public speaking events. 

Donations in Aron’s memory may be made to Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Boston’s Holocaust Services fund (www.jfcsboston.org), or to the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston.