Hollywood producer speaks about wartime experiences
By Sophia Fischer sfischer@theacorn.com

Meyer Gottlieb

It wasn't easy for movie executive Meyer Gottlieb to address the congregation at Temple Beth Haverim in Agoura Hills last Friday, April 13. It was the first time he had talked to an audience about his wartime experiences.

A Holocaust survivor, Gottlieb, 67, spoke in commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, marked worldwide on Sun. April 15. The Century City resident struggled at times to overcome his emotions.

"Hitler dropped the gas into the gas chambers. But the silence of the world permitted him to get away with it," Gottlieb said. "All of us, young and old, has a responsibility to raise our voices and never be silent when evil acts take place anywhere in the world."

A movie producer/distributor, Gottlieb is co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Samuel Goldwyn Films, and president of Night Life, Inc., a feature film and television production services company. He has produced and/or distributed many award-winning films that helped launch the careers of stars like Julia Roberts, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman including "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," "Tortilla Soup," "Amazing Grace," "The Squid and the Whale," "Super Size Me," "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman," "Mystic Pizza," "The Preacher's Wife," and "Lolita."

Gottlieb also produced or distributed "Hotel Terminus" exposing Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie; "Walk on Water," the highest U.S. grossing Israeli film; "O Jerusalem," about the creation of the state of Israel that closes the L.A. Jewish Film Festival on April 26; and "Rosenstrasse," a true story about German women who protested in 1943 Berlin to save their Jewish husbands. This film inspired Gottlieb to speak about his experiences.

"There aren't many people left who are survivors and I was very moved by what he had to say and what he experienced," said Diana Turk, a Beth Haverim member whose mother, Erica Miller, of Hidden Hills, is a Holocaust survivor.

He expressed frustration with the lack of Holocaust coverage by the media which no longer considers the Holocaust newsworthy, Gottlieb added

"Where is the sense of responsibility and the sense of world history? Is it really more relevant to write about Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears or the love lives of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt?" Gottlieb said. "We can't learn from the past if we aren't informed and reminded of it, especially as survivors are getting older and first-person accounts are becoming scarce and will soon disappear."

Gottlieb's family had a good life in a small Polish village. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a carpenter. They were not religious. Gottlieb was born shortly after the Germans invaded Poland in September, 1939.

A Polish military officer, Gottlieb's father warned Jews in his village of the impending danger. Older Jews, including Gottlieb's grandparents suggested that the younger people hide in the woods until danger passed. Gottlieb, his parents, older brother and two uncles loaded a horse drawn wagon while Polish neighbors took their valuables presumably for safekeeping until the Gottliebs returned.

"They knew the truth and we didn't," Gottlieb said.

The family hid by day, traveling at night in search of food. After Russia invaded Poland and fought the Germans, the Gottliebs retreated with the Russians and lived in Ukraine labor camps from 1940-1945.

Although he was young, Gottlieb vividly remembers the birth then death of his baby brother due to the labor camp's terrible living conditions.

"I remember my father taking a lifeless baby, wrapping him in a tallit (prayer shawl), and burying him in a potato field," Gottlieb said. "This image of cold, dark times, a tallit, a shovel going into earth, and a child being buried with prayers and tears. This is a part of my very dark and personal nightmare. . ."

The Russians drafted and rejected Gottlieb's father several times for being Polish and Jewish. But as war progressed Russia drafted everyone. Gottlieb's father died on the front fighting the Germans shortly before the war's end in 1945.

"He is my hero but I hardly knew him," Gottlieb said.

Stalin, the Russian ruler, wanted to get rid of Jews after the war, Gottlieb said.

"He rounded us up, put us on trains, trucks and cars and expelled tens of thousands of Jews through Czechoslovakia and dumped us in the U.S. occupied sector of Germany," Gottlieb said.

The Gottliebs lived in displaced persons camps made of tents and bombed-out buildings surrounded by barbed wire fences. The canned spam thrown from trucks wasn't anything that people recognized as food but being so hungry they ate it, Gottlieb said.

"I have a very vivid memory of running after a truck to get some food, and being so weak from hunger that I passed out," Gottlieb said. "When I see news footage today of what is happening in Africa and other countries where genocide is taking place, it brings back the same horrible memories."

The family prepared to immigrate to Israel. Gottlieb and other boys were taught to fight by a Jewish paramilitary organization called the Haganah. A great aunt in Los Angeles spotted the Gottlieb's name on a Red Cross list of survivors and arranged for the family to come to America on the USS Pershing carrier.

The family arrived in Boston then took a train to Los Angeles. Gottlieb who spoke only Yiddish, learned English from schoolmates and assimilated quickly.

"Compared to where I came from- seeing the energy, the modern buildings, the transportation, the automobiles, and television for the first time, it was paradise," Gottlieb said. "It was like a new birth, a new beginning for my mother, brother and me."

Gottlieb is grateful for the opportunities he has had in America.

"I can't forget what happened. . . I go forward in life with the hope that the power of love and tolerance can subdue and defeat evil," Gottlieb said.