[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 46 (Thursday, April 23, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E650-E651]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO JACK TRAMIEL
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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 pay
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. It is significant, Mr. Speaker, that four of these five are
residents of my home state of California. Mr. Jack Tramiel of the San
Francisco Bay Area, was one of the five that Fortune Magazine selected
to highlight in this extraordinary article, and I want to pay tribute
to him today.
Jack Tramiel, 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 of 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, Jack Tramiel is one of the five Holocaust survivors and
leading American entrepreneurs highlighted in this article. Jack began
as a typewriter repairman and moved on to establish his own firm,
Commodore, which initially manufactured typewriters and adding
machines. In 1976 he moved into the field of computers and took
Commodore to $700 million in sales in 1983. 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 Jack Tramiel from Fortune
Magazine be placed in the Record.
Jack Tramiel--Silicon Valley Founder, Commodore Intl.
Only 10 when the Nazis marched into his city of Lodz,
Poland, in 1939, Jack Tramiel (then named Idek Tramielski)
initially had a kid's thrilled reaction to the sheer
spectacle of the scene: weapons glinting in the sun, soldiers
goose-stepping, planes overhead. ``It was a fantastic
thing,'' he remembers.
Reality crashed down after that. Lodz's Jews--one-third of
the city's 600,000 people--were ordered out of their homes
and into a crowded ghetto. For nearly five years Jack (an
only child) and his parents lived there in one room,
scavenged for food, and worked--his father at shoemaking,
Jack in a pants factory. The faces that the Tramiels saw in
the ghetto changed constantly: Jews left, new Jews came in,
often from other countries. Later Tramiel learned that the
Jewish leader of the ghetto was parceling out its residents
to the Germans, believing that the community would be left in
relative peace as long as he periodically delivered up a
contingent of its residents for deportation--and no doubt
extermination.
In August 1944 the Tramiels themselves were herded into
railroad cars, told they were going to Germany to better
themselves, and instead shipped to Auschwitz. Jack's most
vivid memory of the three-day trip is that each person
received a whole loaf of bread as a ration--a feast beyond
his imagination. At journey's end, the men were separated
from the women (at which point Jack lost track of his mother)
and then themselves split into two groups, one permitted for
the time being to live, the other sent to Auschwitz's gas
chambers. Jack and his father were thumbed into the group
that survived.
A few weeks later, Jack and his father were ``examined'' by
the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele and thumbed again into a
survivors line. ``What do you mean--examine?'' Tramiel is
asked. ``He touched my testicles. He judged whether we were
strong enough to work.'' Having passed, Tramiel and his
father were transported to a spot just outside Hanover,
Germany, and there set to building a concentration camp into
whose barracks they themselves moved. In weather that was
often bitter cold, they worked in thin, pajama-like garments,
and they grew increasingly emaciated on a deprivation diet:
watery ``soup'' and bread in the morning, and a potato,
bread, and more ``soup'' at night.
By December 1944 the Tramiels were assigned to different
work crews and seeing
[[Page E651]]
each other only occasionally. At one of their meetings the
father told the son that many young people in the camp were
managing to smuggle food to their elders--and why hadn't Jack
done that for his father? Stung, Jack studied for days how to
deal with an electric fence that stood between him and an
SS kitchen and finally succeeded in burrowing his thin
frame under it to steal food--one potato and some peels.
But when he got the food to his father, malnutrition had
gripped the older man and grossly swollen his body. He
could not eat. Soon after, he died in the camp's
infirmary. Later, Jack learned that the death was directly
caused by an injection of gasoline into his father's
veins.
As the winter stretched into the spring of 1945, Jack
Tramiel himself grew increasingly fatalistic. But then a
strange end-of-the-war tableau unfolded. First, the Germans
vanished from the camp; second, the Red Cross moved in
briefly, overfed the prisoners to the point that some died,
and then left; third, the Germans returned and then vanished
again. On their heels came two American soldiers--``20-foot-
tall black men, the first blacks I'd ever seen,'' says
Tramiel--who loomed in a barracks door, peered at the
prisoners hiding beneath the straw of their bunks, said
something in English that one Jew gleaned as ``More Americans
will be coming,'' and left. Next a tank rolled up. In it
stood a Jewish chaplain in dress uniform, who declared in
Yiddish: ``You are free,'' and told the tank to move on.
These were troops of the advancing American Army, the month
was April 1945, and Tramiel was 16.
Tramiel, today 69 and a fireplug in build, stayed in Europe
for more than two years after his liberation, and many of his
recollections of those days concern food: how he tricked his
way into a sanitarium to a rich, and shamefully fattening,
diet; how he gorged happily while working in an American Army
kitchen; how he did other odd jobs for ``money or food.'' But
he also learned during this time that his mother was alive
and back again in Lodz. He saw her there but then left,
resolved by that time to marry a concentration-camp survivor
he'd met, Helen Goldgrub, and go with her to the U.S.
The two wed in Germany in July 1947. They got to the U.S.
separately, though--he first, in November of that year. His
confidence, strengthened by what he'd survived, bordered on
hubris: ``I figured I could handle just about anything,'' he
says. He started out living at a Jewish agency, HIAS, in New
York City; got a job as a handyman at a Fifth Avenue lamp
store; learned English from American movies; and at their end
pigged out on chocolate instead of eating regular dinners.
Then, in early 1948, he did the improbable, joining the
U.S. Army. By the time he left it four years later, he'd been
reunited with his wife and fathered a son (the first of
three). The Army had also pointed him to a career by putting
him in charge of repairing office equipment in the New York
City area.
When Tramiel checked back into civilian life, he entered a
long period of close encounters with machines that typed
words and manipulated numbers. He first worked, at $50 a
week, for a struggling typewriter-repair shop. Using his
Army connections, Tramiel got the owner a contract to
service several thousand machines. ``The guy flipped,''
says Tramiel, but did not give his enterprising employee a
raise. ``I have no intention of working for people who
have no brains,'' said Tramiel to the owner, and quit.
Tramiel then bought a typewriter shop in the Bronx. He did
repair work for Fordham University and, when he once got a
chance to buy scads of used typewriters, rebuilt and resold
them. He next prepared to import machines from Italy, but
found he could get the import exclusivity he wanted only by
moving to Canada. It was in Toronto, in 1955, that he founded
a company he called Commodore, an importer and eventually a
manufacturer of both typewriters and adding machines. Why
Commodore? Because Tramiel wanted a name with a military ring
and because higher ranks, such as General and Admiral, were
already taken.
Commodore went public in 1962 at a Canadian bargain-
basement price of $2.50 a share--a deal that raised funds
Tramiel needed to pay off big loans he'd gotten from a
Canadian financier named C. Powell Morgan, head of Atlantic
Acceptance. Deep trouble erupted in the mid-1960s when
Atlantic, to which Commodore was almost joined at the hip,
went bankrupt, amid charges of fraudulent financial
statements, dummy companies, and propped stock prices.
Tramiel was never charged with illegalities, but an
investigative commission concluded that he was probably not
blameless. In any case, the Canadian financial establishment
ostracized him. Struggling to keep Commodore itself out of
bankruptcy, he was forced in 1966 to give partial control of
the company to Canadian investor Irving Gould.
Commodore's line then was still typewriters and adding
machines, but the electronics revolution was under way and
setting up shop in Silicon Valley. Tramiel himself moved
there in the late 1960s and soon, displaying a speed-to-
market talent that has characterized his whole life, had
Commodore pumping out electronic calculators. In time, one
product, a hand-held calculator, grew so popular that it was
self-destructive: The company that supplied Commodore with
semiconductor chips, Texas Instruments, decided to produce
calculators itself--selling them at prices that Commodore
couldn't match.
With Commodore again reeling, Tramiel vowed never again to
be at the mercy of a vital supplier. In 1976 he made a
momentous acquisition: MOS Technology, a Pennsylvania chip
manufacturer that also turned out to be extravagantly
nurturing about 200 different R&D projects. Tramiel, a slash-
and-burn, early-day Al Dunlap in management style, killed
most of the projects immediately. But he listened hard when
an engineer named Chuck Peddle told him the company had a
chip that was effectively a microcomputer. And small
computers, said Peddle, ``are going to be the future of
the world.''
Willing to take a limited gamble, Tramiel told Peddle that
he and Tramiel's second son, Leonard, then getting a Columbia
University astrophysics degree, had six months to come up
with a computer Commodore could display at an upcoming Comdex
electronics show. They made the deadline. ``And everyone
loved the product,'' says Tramiel, relishingly rolling out
its name, PET, for Personal Electronic Transactor.
Unfortunately, this was potentially an expensive pet,
carrying a lot of risk--and demanding, says Tramiel, ``a lot
of money I still did not have.'' So he determined to gauge
demand by running newspaper ads that offered six-week
delivery on a computer priced at $599, a seductive figure on
which Tramiel thought he could still make a profit. The ads
appeared, and a hugely encouraging $3 million in checks came
back.
Commodore got to the market with its computer in 1977, in
the same year that Apple and Tandy put their micros on sale.
In the next few years, Tramiel drove those competitors and
others wild by combatively pushing prices down and down, to
levels like $200. He also became famous for rough treatment
of suppliers, customers, and executives--and about it all was
fiercely unrepentant. ``Business is war,'' he said. ``I don't
believe in compromising. I believe in winning.''
Which is what he did in those early years for computers,
leading Commodore to $700 million in sales in fiscal 1983 and
$88 million in profits. At its peak price in those days, the
stock that Tramiel had sold in 1962 at a price of $2.50 a
share was up to $1,200, and his 6.5% slice of the company was
worth $120 million.
But then, in early 1984, just as annual sales were climbing
above $1 billion, Tramiel clashed with a Commodore
stockholder mightier than he, Irving Gould--and when the
smoke had cleared, Tramiel was out. The nature of their
quarrel was never publicly disclosed. Today, however, Tramiel
says he wanted to ``grow'' the comapny, and Gould didn't.
Commodore was really Tramiel's last hurrah. True, he
surfaced again quickly in the computer industry, agreeing
later in 1984 to take over--for a pittance--Warner
Communications' foundering Atari operation. But in a business
changing convulsively as IBM brought out its PC and the
clones marched in, Atari was a loser and ultimately a venture
into which Tramiel was unwilling to sink big money.
Eventually he folded Atari into a Silicon Valley disk-drive
manufacturer, KTS, in which he has a major interest but plays
no operational role.
Today Tramiel is basically retired and managing his money.
From four residences, he's cut down to one, a palatial house
atop a foothill in Monte Sereno, Calif. In its garage are two
Rolls-Royces, a type of luxury to which Tramiel has long been
addicted.
Naturally, charity fundraisers took Tramiel up. When those
for the Holocaust Memorial Museum appeared, he at first
thought of it as just one more philanthropic cause to be
supported. But his wife, Helen, 69, who spent her
concentration camp days at Bergen-Belsen, is intensely aware
that both she and her husband survived what millions of other
Jews did not. ``No,'' she said adamantly, ``for this one we
have to go all out.''
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