[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 44 (Tuesday, April 21, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E601-E602]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          TRIBUTE TO FRED KORT

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 21, 1998

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday of this week, representatives of 
the Congress, the Administration, and the Supreme Court will gather in 
the Great Rotunda of this building for the National Civic Commemoration 
to remember the victims of the Holocaust. This annual national memorial 
service pays tribute to the six million Jews who died through senseless 
and systematic Nazi terror and brutality. At this somber commemoration, 
we will also honor those heroic American and other Allied forces who 
liberated the Nazi concentration camps over half a century ago.
  Mr. Speaker, this past week Fortune Magazine (April 13, 1998) devoted 
several pages to an article entitled ``Everything in History was 
Against Them,'' which profiles five survivors of Nazi savagery who came 
to the United States penniless and built fortunes here in their adopted 
homeland. It is significant, Mr. Speaker, that four of these five are 
residents of my home state of California. My dear friend Fred Kort of 
Los Angeles was one of the five that Fortune Magazine selected to 
highlight in this extraordinary article, and I want to pay tribute to 
him today.
  Fred Kort, like the other four singled out by Fortune Magazine, has a 
unique story, but there are common threads to these five tales of 
personal success. The story of the penniless immigrant who succeeds in 
America is a familiar theme in our nation's lore, but these stories 
involve a degree of courage and determination unmatched in the most 
inspiring of Horatio Alger's stories.
  These men were, in the words of author Carol J. Loomis, ``Holocaust 
survivors in the most rigorous sense,'' they ``actually experienced the 
most awful horrors of the Holocaust, enduring a Nazi death camp or a 
concentration camp or one of the ghettos that were essentially holding 
pens for those camps.''
  They picked themselves up ``from the very cruelest of circumstances, 
they traveled to America and prospered as businessmen. They did it, to 
borrow a phrase from Elie Wiesel, when everything in history was 
against them.'' They were teenagers or younger when World War II began. 
They lost six years of their youth and six years of education. ``They 
were deprived of liberty and shorn of dignity. All lost relatives, and 
most lost one or both parents. Each . . . was forced to live constantly 
with the threat of death and the knowledge that next time he might be 
`thumbed' not into a line of prisoners allowed to live, but into 
another line headed for the gas chambers.'' Through luck and the sheer 
will to survive, these were some of the very fortunate who lived to 
tell the story of that horror.
  The second part of their stories is also similar--a variant of the 
American dream. These courageous men came to the United States with 
``little English and less money.'' Despite their lack of friends and 
mentors, they found the drive to succeed. As Loomis notes, ``many 
millions who were unencumbered by the heavy, exhausting baggage of the 
Holocaust had the same opportunities and never reached out to seize 
them as these men did.'' Their

[[Page E602]]

success in view of the immense obstacles that impeded their path makes 
their stories all the more remarkable.
  One other element that is also common to these five outstanding 
business leaders--they are ``Founders'' of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 
Museum here in Washington, D.C. They have shown a strong commitment to 
remembering the brutal horrors of the Holocaust, paying honor to its 
victims, and working to prevent the repetition of this vicious 
inhumanity.
  Mr. Speaker, Fred Kort is one of the five Holocaust survivors and 
leading American entrepreneurs highlighted in this article. Fred is the 
Chairman of the Imperial Toy Corporation in Los Angeles. As we here in 
the Congress mark the annual Days of Remembrance in honor of the 
victims of Nazi terror, I ask that the profile of Fred Kort from 
Fortune Magazine be placed in the Congressional Record.

                 [From Fortune Magazine, Apr. 13, 1998]

                 Everything in History Was Against Them


                Fred Kort, Chairman, Imperial Toy Corp.

       He's 74 now and has hair that spikes from his forehead as 
     if it were exhibiting surprise at having made it this far. 
     That image fits Fred Kort's life: At Treblinka, the Nazis' 
     killing camp in north-central Poland, somewhere between 
     700,000 and 850,000 Jews were exterminated and only nine are 
     believed to have survived. Kort is one of the nine.
       Before Treblinka, the youth then called Manfred endured the 
     Holocaust as most of its survivors did, fleeing and barely 
     substituting. The son of a hard-up Polish Jew who lived in 
     Germany, he was pushed with his family into Poland and then, 
     as the Germans overran that country in September 1939, into a 
     succession of mean ghettos and work camps. Once, when he was 
     17, he turned smalltime entrepreneur, sneaking out of the 
     Warsaw ghetto, risking capture and probable death each trip, 
     to sell baking power, cinnamon, and other spices on the 
     streets. ``When you're young,'' he says, ``you think you're 
     invincible.''
       He abandoned such thoughts in July 1943, when the Germans 
     summarily collected Kort and 2,000 other Jews and packed them 
     into cattle cars headed for Treblinka. The train crawled for 
     two days, and people perished. Those who didn't were shoved 
     into a selection process aimed at sending around 300 of the 
     strongest to the work camp called Treblinka 1 and the rest to 
     the gas chambers of Treblinka 2. From the grass on which all 
     the Jews huddled, one man rose to plead for the work camp and 
     was immediately shot. Kort nonetheless also rose and in 
     German said rapidly that he was an electrician--true, sort 
     of, since he'd been an apprentice before the war--and could 
     be useful. A German raised his gun. He then waved Kort to the 
     work group.
       Kort skinned by for about a year, mainly doing water-
     carrying duty that got him food from the guards' kitchen. 
     Then one day in July 1944, the Jews in Treblinka 1--about 550 
     at that point--heard the guns of the advancing Russian army. 
     To them the sound was ominous, because they felt sure their 
     German captors would not let them live to broadcast the story 
     of Treblinka 2's exterminations. On a Sunday morning, July 
     23, 1944, guards burst into Kort's barracks with a rough 
     command: ``Lie down wherever you are.'' Instead, Kort ran, 
     climbing out a barracks window and hiding in a storage shed.
       Guards searched the shed but did not find him. He hid there 
     until nighttime, repeatedly hearing gunfire that he assumed, 
     correctly, meant that Jews were being shot.
       And then--we know this scene from fiction, except that this 
     was not--Kort covertly watched the guards patrolling the 
     camp's three rings of fences, discovering that their rounds 
     were at intervals of 15 to 20 minutes. When the moment seemed 
     right, he took a spade and ran for the fences, there finding 
     the ground so softened by rain that he could dig under them 
     easily. As he crossed a corn field outside the fences, 
     sentries in the camp's towers tried to shoot him down, but he 
     zigzagged into woods just beyond. He walked all that night 
     and in the morning discovered that he must have gone in a 
     circle, because he had returned to the camp's edge and to 
     mass graves that held the hundreds of Jews murdered on the 
     previous day.
       Shortly, Kort joined up with members of the Polish 
     underground. But Jews were unwelcome there, and within days 
     he risked crossing into Russian-held territory, his hands 
     high as he entreated: ``Don't shoot, comrades. I'm a Jew.'' 
     Russian troops interrogated him for ten days before finally 
     accepting his Treblinka story as true.
       Later, Kort entered the official Polish army, then 
     reconstituting itself, and in a battle caught a piece of 
     shrapnel from a German shell. A far deeper wound: His 
     father, his brother, and 60 relatives died in the 
     Holocaust.
       Fred Kort, then 24, arrived in the U.S. in 1947 with a 
     nickel. On the boat that carried him, he used the English 
     he'd begun to learn in postwar Europe to ask a sailor what 
     American money was like--and got not just a look but a coin 
     to keep. Beyond the nickel, though, Kort had some resources, 
     because he was under the wing of the American Jewish Joint 
     Distribution Committee--called the Joint by all who knew it. 
     The Joint put him up in a modest Manhattan hotel, and soon he 
     got a job at Bendix Corp. and entered night school.
       Still exploiting those electrical skills, Kort next landed 
     a job at General Electric and in time wangled a transfer to 
     California. Leaving GE, he went to work for Los Angeles' 
     Biltmore Hotel as an electrician. On one fateful day, he was 
     called to a guest's room to fix a desk lamp. Engaging Kort in 
     conversation, the guest, Martin Feder, said he was planning 
     to open a toy factory and wondered if Kort knew anybody he 
     might hire. ``How about me?'' Kort asked, in a question that 
     would chart the rest of his career.
       Over the next 20 years he worked for Feder, who specialized 
     in producing the bubble-blowing kits that we all used as 
     kids; started, and folded, a bubbles company of his own; and 
     served as a manufacturers' rep for other toy manufacturers, 
     proving to be a master salesman who could have sold jump 
     ropes to snails. As a rep, he made good money. So he was 
     ready to march when by chance he came upon a tiny, hard-
     rubber, high-bouncing ball that hadn't been pushed in the 
     market. In 1969, Kort took this irrepressible bit, the Teeny 
     Bouncer, and $50,000 and, with a partner, set up Imperial Toy 
     Corp.
       Today the partner's gone, but the original Teeny Bouncer is 
     still a big seller in Imperial's huge line of 880 toys. Most 
     of the items are the year-round, very basic, $1.99-to-$4.99 
     stuff of everyone's childhood--jacks, marbles, balloons, 
     paddle balls, water guns, rubber snakes, and yes, bubble 
     kits, of which Imperial is the world's largest producer. 
     Imperial's 1997 sales were just over $100 million, which 
     makes the company a midget compared to Mattel and Hasbro but 
     a steady, important force in an industry teeming with 
     smaller, trend-riding companies. Kort says with particular 
     pride that Imperial has never had ``a losing year.'' That 
     applies even to 1997, though the importance of money in that 
     year was dwarfed by a disaster: a November explosion in 
     Imperial's Los Angeles headquarters (linked to roll caps sold 
     by the company) that killed four factory employees and 
     injured several others.
       That tragedy punctured Kort's natural ebullience, but not 
     much else does. From an office decorated in purple--and with 
     that hair going boing!--he runs his business as if he expects 
     to be there forever, which he pretty much does. His son 
     Jordan, one of three sons who work with him and try to match 
     his pace, says his father has ``this drive, this incredible 
     drive.''
       Since the war, Kort has testified in four war-crimes trials 
     and has sketched, from memory, a detailed map of Treblinka 1 
     that is now at Washington's Holocaust museum. But Kort is in 
     no way locked into the memories of the past. Deeply aware 
     that America has been good to him, he is instead propelled by 
     the thought that he'd just better bounce out there and ``do 
     more.''

     

                          ____________________