[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 46 (Thursday, April 23, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E644-E645]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM KONAR

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 23, 1998

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, today representatives of the Congress, the 
Administration, and the Supreme Court gathered in the Great Rotunda of 
this historic 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 
also honored 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. Mr. William Konar of Rochester, New York, was one of the five 
that Fortune Magazine selected to highlight in this extraordinary 
article, and I want to pay tribute to him today.
  William Konar, 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 loved 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, DC. 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, William Konar is one of the five Holocaust survivors and 
leading American entrepreneurs highlighted in this article. Mr. Konar 
was extremely successful in developing a chain of 84 discount 
drugstores, and he has been active and successful in real estate after 
selling the drugstore operation. As we here in the Congress mark the 
annual Days of Remembrance in honor of the victims of Nazi terror, I am 
inserting the profile of William Konar from Fortune Magazine be placed 
in the Record.

                             William Konar


         ROCHESTER, N.Y.--RACK JOBBING, DRUGSTORES, REAL ESTATE

       In the years since World War II, Bill Konar, now 68, has 
     talked very little of his Holocaust experience, and as he 
     made the effort recently for a visitor, his face gradually 
     tightened, coming to look as if he could barely squeeze out 
     the words. He was the youngest child of four in a family that 
     lived in the central Poland city of Radom. His father, a 
     leather wholesaler, died when he was 4--but not before the 
     father had identified this son, Welwel by name then, as an 
     uncontrollable piece of work, a stealer from the father's 
     cash register even, who would surely someday ``end up in 
     Alcatraz'' (indeed, infamous even in Radom).
       After the Germans marched into Poland, Radom's Jews were 
     first forced into work, then into ghettos, and ultimately 
     into terrible episodes of separation, with the women and 
     small children taken away and the men left in the ghettos. 
     Bill, though only 12 and slight in build, was put with the 
     men. After the time of separation, in July 1942, he never 
     again saw his mother, his sister, her baby, or her husband 
     (who had refused to leave his family).
       Throughout these years, Bill's older brothers, Herszek (now 
     Harry) and Moshe (now Morris), both teenagers, worked for the 
     Wehrmacht. Aware, though, that his youth and small size made 
     him look useless and expendable, Bill hid in ghetto attics 
     for long periods. Later he worked, doing food-depot duty that 
     he remembers as grueling.
       By the summer of 1944, the Russians were advancing fast on 
     the eastern front, and the Germans in Radom grew apprehensive 
     that their Jews, many by then well-trained war workers, would 
     escape. So the Konars and hundreds of other victims in the 
     area were put into a forced march for more than 100 miles and 
     at its end herded into railroad boxcars said to be headed for 
     work camps in Germany. The stops turned out to include 
     Auschwitz. There, the Jews were ordered out of their cars and 
     subjected to still another weeding out in which the weak, 
     elderly, and sick were shunted off to the gas chambers, and 
     the others were shoved back onto the train. When the cars 
     pulled out again, Bill was aboard, and so were his brothers.
       The three ended the war at a work camp near Stuttgart, 
     Germany, where Bill fell under the protection of a German 
     cook, who liked this imp of a kid, let him sneak food to his 
     family, and, in the final days of war, even helped him hide a 
     brother threatened with transport one more time. On 
     liberation day for the Konars, May 7, 1945, Bill was 15--
     hardened way beyond his years, but still 15.
       Right after the war, Bill got into a school run by a relief 
     agency and began to learn English. That gave him a head start 
     when, in 1946, he became part of a boatload of orphans 
     brought to the U.S. and dispersed countrywide to homes that 
     either wanted or would have them. ``They picked Rochester for 
     me,'' he says, and that's where he's been ever since (along 
     with his brothers, who came later). In the city's leading 
     hospital, Strong Memorial, there is a renowned unit called 
     the William and Sheila Konar Center for Digestive and Liver 
     Diseases that would not exist had not Rochester gotten hold 
     of this 16-year-old.
       The U.S. government paid $10 a week to a Mrs. Goldberg to 
     keep him. He somehow passed tests that qualified him to enter 
     the junior class of Benjamin Franklin High School, and in his 
     two years there he played soccer, worked for 25 cents an hour 
     at a supermarket, and otherwise took on the spots--though 
     definitely not the accent--of an American teenager. Once 
     graduated, he

[[Page E645]]

     even began taking some classes at the University of 
     Rochester.
       But by that time he was working just about every other hour 
     of the day, getting a kick out of paying income taxes, and 
     showing a marked talent for business. He sold canned foods 
     and then kosher pickles to grocers and restaurants. Next, he 
     caught on to a new wholesaling trend: the placing, or ``rack 
     jobbing,'' of health and beauty aids in food stores. He 
     started with goods from Lever Brothers, Pacquin, and Ben-Gay; 
     spread into phonograph records and housewares; and eventually 
     got beyond mom-and-pop stores into the bigger spreads 
     serviced by Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA). But the time 
     he was 23, in 1952, his company, which he owned with a 
     partner, had sales of $1 million. And in another ten years he 
     was minus the partner and on his own, raking in good profits 
     on sales above $3 million. From a street in Rochester on 
     which he rented a building, he'd also lit on a Yankee-
     sounding name for his company, Clinton.
       In business he had all the right entrepreneurial instincts 
     and disciplines. ``Cash is king'' was a motto, meaning that 
     he unequivocally expected his invoices to be paid when due. 
     Big or not, J.C. Penney, to which Konar wholesaled records, 
     got axed as a customer when it proved to be a slow payer. 
     Konar also habitually worked like a demon. He wife, Sheila, 
     whom he married when he was 24, rolls her eyes at the memory: 
     ``He was crazy; I didn't have a husband.'' Once, she says, 
     her house caught on fire and he was too busy to come home, so 
     he sent one of his managers to help instead.
       Konar might have stayed at rack jobbing forever had not his 
     biggest customer, IGA, decided in 1962 to go ``direct,'' 
     which meant it would cut out his middleman and his profits 
     and instead itself supply the goods he'd been selling. The 
     move caught Konar at a terrible time--he'd just bulked up in 
     warehouse space--he was too independent and too riled to 
     accept IGA's offer to buy him out. Said Konar to IGA's 
     president: ``I've been through the war, and I'm not going to 
     take any crap from anybody.''
       He and IGA began gradually to phase out their dealings, and 
     within months Konar simply went into an entirely new 
     business: owning and operating discount drugstores (which, of 
     course, could be fed from some of his spare warehouse space). 
     His first two stores were in Muskegon and Traverse City, 
     Mich., and from there, he added on another 80 stores 
     stretching east to Rhode Island. His business formula was 
     simple: very low prices, overseen by store managers who got a 
     cut of the profits. It all worked well enough to get him to 
     $12 million in sales in 1968 and $1 million in profits, 
     earned from 64 drugstores and a small but still profitable 
     rack-jobbing business.
       And at that point, Konar took Clinton Merchandising public, 
     in a sale that reduced his ownership of the company from 100% 
     to 67% and also brought about $2 million into the company. On 
     paper, the deal made Konar worth about $9 million, not bad 
     considering where he'd come from. But he was no happier with 
     public ownership than was Nathan Shapell, and he soon started 
     listening to acquisition propositions. The eventual buyer was 
     Melville Corp., which in 1972 acquired Clinton (by then up to 
     84 stores) for about $21.5 million. On paper this deal raised 
     Konar's net worth to more than $14 million.
       Melville combined Clinton's retail operations with its own 
     chain of discount drugstores. CVS, and used many of Konar's 
     merchandising ideas to build the highly successful chain that 
     exists today. Konar himself stayed around, working part-time, 
     for nine years. And then, at age 52, he ``retired.''
       His hair has a retirement look, having long ago turned 
     white. But a life of complete leisure has no charms from him; 
     he has spent the past couple of decades building a real 
     estate business in Rochester, William B. Konar Enterprises. 
     The business owns apartments, townhouses, and warehouses, and 
     is constructing an industrial park on the edge of Rochester.
       Konar's own house, on the Erie Canal in suburban Rochester, 
     is very nice but not lavish. Nearby, though, is the large and 
     elegant new home of Konar's daughter, Rachel, her husband 
     (who works for Konar), and their two children. Konar played 
     tour guide through the house recently, clearly enjoying the 
     moment. As he finished up and headed for his car, he looked 
     back at the home with a grin, shook his head in wonder at it 
     all, and said, ``What a country!''

     

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