[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 45 (Wednesday, April 22, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E620-E621]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       TRIBUTE TO NATHAN SHAPELL

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 22, 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 Nathan Shapell 
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.
  Nate Shapell, 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 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, Nathan Shapell is one of the five Holocaust survivors 
and leading American entrepreneurs highlighted in this article. Nate is 
the Chairman of Shapell Industries 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 Nate Shapell from Fortune 
Magazine be placed in the Record.

                     [From Fortune, April 13, 1998]

              Nathan Shapell--Chairman, Shapell Industries

       Nathan Shapell's history illustrates two truths about the 
     Holocaust. First, by sharp and courageous use of his wits, a 
     Jew could often greatly improve his chances of surviving. 
     Second, in the end he practically always needed luck as well.
       Now 76, Shapell (originally named Schapelski) was the 
     youngest of five children in a family that lived in the 
     western Poland city of Sosnowiec. After the Nazis invaded 
     Poland, though, the father and two of his children scattered, 
     leaving Nathan, then still in his teens, the only male in a 
     household of four. Growing up quickly, he got decent work in 
     the city's sanitation department and also gained the favor of 
     certain German officials by managing to get them scarcities 
     such as textiles and meat. For nearly three years Shapell's 
     standing with these Germans not only kept his family safe but 
     also allowed him repeatedly to help other Jews.
       In the summer of 1942, however, Shapell's mother and 
     hundreds of other Sosnowiec Jews were rounded up and 
     incarcerated in a part of the city called Targowa. Frantic 
     but able once more to tap the help of his Germans, Nathan got 
     past Targowa's guards on the pretense that he was going in to 
     survey the sanitation needs of the area. Making his way 
     through crowds of desperate Jews, he finally found his 
     mother, gave her food, and promised her help.
       But he also realized that the sanitation arm band he wore 
     might be the key to more rescues. Later that day he told the 
     authorities that Targowa's sanitation needs were large, and 
     secured permission to go into the area at least daily with a 
     small crew. Over the next few days, he and his men entered 
     just before a shift change for the guards, with each member 
     of his crew wearing a sanitation arm band--and with a few 
     more arm bands stuffed into Shapell's pocket. These he gave 
     to male prisoners, who each day exited, trying to appear 
     nonchalant, with the crews and their refuse-loaded carts. The 
     discovery of this ruse would almost certainly have meant 
     death for all concerned, but the guards on the new shifts 
     never caught on.
       Next Shapell focused on the huge pots of soup that were 
     each day carried into Targowa and later taken out empty. 
     Shapell and his men instead filled them up with small 
     children (warned to total silence) and then boldly carried 
     out the posts, as if they were simply helping with the day's 
     chores. A half-dozen or so children, most thrust at the men 
     by their parents, were rescued that way and released outside 
     the gate. One, a small

[[Page E621]]

     girl of 5 or 6, looked up from the street where Shapell had 
     set her and said, ``Where shall I go?'' He answered, ``Child, 
     I don't know. Run, run.'' As he tried to talk about that 
     moment recently, Shapell broke down, unable to finish.
       In a week of arm bands and soup pots, Shapell did not 
     manage to rescue his mother. He finally succeeded, though, on 
     a chaotic day in which the Germans encircled all of Targowa's 
     Jews with a gigantic noose of rope and prepared to load them 
     up for transport. Shapell's mother escaped because Nathan, 
     talking his way into Targowa, found her and made her lie down 
     on a pile of dead bodies. He then contrived to get the job of 
     removing the bodies for disposal and got his mother to 
     safety.
       By the summer of 1943, though, the Nazis' vicious campaign 
     to make Europe Judenrein--free of Jews--had wrenched the 
     family apart and sent each of its members to a work camp or a 
     concentration camp. The hellhole of Auschwitz-Birkenau was 
     Nathan's lot, but there his youth and relative vigor got him 
     thumbed into line of people to work, not die. He was then 
     tattooed with the number he still wears: 134138.
       In the nearly two years of captivity, hunger, and 
     oppression that followed, he continued to be sustained by 
     wits, guts, and a steely resolve to survive. He smuggled food 
     out of kitchens, hid when exposure would have meant death, 
     and got himself classified as a carpenter though he could 
     barely drive a nail. But there was a moment near war's end, 
     at a work site called Gintergruber, when nothing else counted 
     but luck. One day a prisoner in his work crew escaped. When 
     none of the other prisoners would admit to knowledge of how 
     he'd gotten out, SS troops lined them up--some 200 men, in 
     ranks four deep. Shapell was in the front row. The SS counted 
     down it, ordering the fifth man to step forward, and then the 
     next fifth man, until ten prisoners were lined up for all to 
     see. The ten were then shot. Shapell, in the 80% of the front 
     line that survived, went back to work.
       Shapell was later moved in a forced march to a camp called 
     Waldenburg. Freedom arrived there on May 8, 1945. No German 
     guards came that morning to make their daily head count, and 
     in the afternoon the camp's commandant drove out for the last 
     time, his eyes venomous as he looked back at the prisoners 
     watching in disbelief. The Jews then swarmed out of the camp 
     to scavenge for food, on the way encountering Russian 
     soldiers who were still at war, even though Germany had 
     surrendered the day before.
       The world called them ``displaced persons,'' and in the 
     next six years Shapell, 23 at the end of the war, became a 
     leader in aiding homeless Jews who bore the label. His place 
     of work was a small Bavarian town named Munchberg, where he 
     established a model DP community. He oversaw the construction 
     of houses and even set up a large home that took in Jewish 
     children with no place to go. Wrote an American officer who 
     had authority over Munchberg and knew himself fortunate to 
     have crossed paths with this young refugee: ``I heartily 
     endorse Mr. Schapelski as an energetic, efficient, 
     trustworthy, and most capable man.''
       For Nathan, Munchberg meant more than work well done. He 
     was married there (to a Holocaust survivor) and was joined in 
     the town by two siblings who turned out to have survived the 
     war, Sala and David. (The remaining four members of Shapell's 
     family are either known, or believed, to have died.) 
     Eventually Nathan, David, and an Auschwitz friend of Nathan's 
     who Sala married, Max Weisbrot, secured a permit to start a 
     textile manufacturing and wholesaling business, and it did 
     well.
       So it was that when the three men make it to the U.S. in 
     the early 1950s, they had some money. They went first to 
     Detroit because a relative lived there. But Nathan didn't 
     like Detroit, and they traveled in search of another landing 
     spot, thinking that either supermarkets or homebuilding might 
     be their future. They hit California, and for Nathan it was 
     love at first sight. ``Just the trees,'' he says today, 
     ``just the smell from the oranges and lemons. It was 
     unbelievable, beautiful.''
       Through a Detroit connection, they met one night with a 
     young building contractor in Los Angeles, Morley Benjamin. 
     Knowing their English to be inadequate, the three visitors 
     brought with them a taxi driver hired to be a translator--but 
     he kept falling asleep. The meeting came to nothing.
       Some months later, though, having picked up more English, 
     the three went back to Benjamin, and this time they struck a 
     deal to build houses together. The Shapell group put in 
     $600,000, and Morely Benjamin and a partner contributed 
     expertise. In two suburbs of Los Angeles, Norwalk and 
     Whittier, they built some 2,400 houses and sold them to 
     veterans for $10,990 each, no money down. Nathan, the leader 
     of this band, badgered the young builder he always called 
     ``Mr. Benjamin` to teach him everything he knew about the 
     business. Remembers Benjamin: ``Nathan was constantly in my 
     office, constantly wanting to know. Once I said to him, 
     `Nathan, do not come back for at least an hour.' '' But 
     Benjamin says Shapell never asked the same question twice. He 
     was, besides, a whiz with figures.
       In 1955 the parties split up, amiably. Shapell, with his 
     relatives, formed S&S Construction and proceeded to build 
     anew in Norwald. He has always had a belief, he says today, 
     that a prudent man should keep one-third of his money in cash 
     and another one-third in good ``stuff,` and then if he 
     wishes, put the other one-third at risk. But in 1955 he felt 
     the Norwalk project required the commitment of everything he 
     had. Out of it, though, came a small profit, enough to send 
     S&S Construction on its way.
       Since then the company now called Shapell Industries has 
     built 64,000 houses and spread well beyond Lost Angeles. The 
     company is known for high-quality building, for astute 
     purchases of land, and for conservative financial behavior in 
     an industry that tends to binge on leverage. Shapell himself 
     dresses down from the elegant suits he wears in his office 
     and ``walks'' his sites, doing hands-on quality control. He 
     is not apt to stop those inspections soon: For three years a 
     widower, he usually works at least six days a week and has no 
     plans to retire.
        In his business history, there is a period that caused him 
     anguish. In 1969, when his company was doing about $30 
     million in sales and $3 million in profits, he took it public 
     and was immediately sorry. Impatient by nature--``he has the 
     attention span of a gnat,'' says an acquaintance--he could 
     not abide dealing with securities analysts. He feels, 
     moreover, that the homebuilding business, with its cycles, 
     weather delays, and general ups and downs, is not well suited 
     to a public market that craves consistency. ``If you are 
     honest and reporting exactly what happens,'' Shapell says, 
     ``Wall Street tells you goodbye.'' His company was itself a 
     case history in volatility. In 1981, when interest rates 
     skyrocketed, it lost nearly $10 million on revenues that 
     exceeded $300 million--another period of acute anguish for 
     Shapell. By 1983, through, the company was making $15 million 
     on revenues cut by a third.
        So in 1984, Shapell took his creation private, buying in 
     the 28% of the company that the public owned for $33 million. 
     Best money he ever spent, says Shapell: ``when we'd done the 
     deal, I felt like a million pounds had been taken off me.`` 
     It hardly ranks with the first, of course, but he calls that 
     day his ``second liberation.''

     

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