Samuel Gruber (1913–2006)

Samuel Gruber was born Munyo Gruber to a Jewish family in Podhajce, Poland (present-day Ukraine). As a youth, he belonged to the Zionist organizations Ha-Shomer ha-Tza'ir and He-halutz. He attended high school in Lvov (Lviv), and remained there after graduation for about two years. He then returned to his hometown, where he worked as a bookkeeper. Though it was rare for Jews to be drafted into the Polish military, Samuel was called up and served for 18 months. When World War II began in September 1939, he was called up again, and during the fighting, he was badly wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. After spending a month in the hospital, Samuel and other Jewish prisoners were separated out and transported first to Germany and later to Lublin, Poland. There Samuel was used as a slave laborer by the Nazis to build the Majdanek concentration camp. He stole a pistol and organized 22 other Jewish prisoners to join him in an escape plan. On October 28, 1942, they broke out of the camp and went into the nearby Parczew forest, where they met up with partisans. Samuel took the nom de guerre Mietek, a typical Polish name, as the leader of the group. In early 1943, he met Frank Blaichman and joined his Jewish partisan unit, the Markuszo group. Although some of Mietek's group were barely past adolescence, within months they had matured into a well-disciplined unit of freedom fighters.They engaged in sabotage, derailing trains and ambushing German trucks on highways. They hid other Jews -- mostly camp and ghetto escapees -- in peasant homes. During his two years with the partisans, Mietek was wounded twice more in battles with the Nazis. Of the original 22 escapees from Majdanek, only three survived. Sam/Mietek was freed when the Red Army liberated Lublin in the summer of 1944. There was nothing for him to go home to. He married Judith Jeleniewcz, who had survived in hiding with a Polish Christian family. For two years, the couple ran a displaced persons camp for children in Prien am Chiemse in Upper Bavaria, Germany. In 1949, they emigrated to the USA with their son. Sam published a memoir in 1978 about his wartime experiences entitled I Chose Life.