[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

                                 ______
                                 

                            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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