Greenblat’s Survivor Story Educates Thousands
Holocaust survivor Herschel Greenblat shares his story with students across the state and beyond.

Hershel Greenblat is on a mission.
For the past decade, the 83-year-old Holocaust survivor has been telling his story to groups all over Georgia and beyond, mostly to middle and high school students.
“The reason that I continue to educate is that I want them to know that what happened was for only one reason — hate. We have to do everything in our being to bring hatred to a stop and bring respect for everyone.”
His message of the importance of being a good person and standing up against hate has become his calling. At The Breman, Atlanta’s Jewish Heritage Museum, where he speaks two to three times a week during the school year, Greenblat stands in front of a group of seventh and eighth graders. The kids, riveted, hear the story of young Hershel, born Grisha Grinblat, in a cave in Ukraine in 1941, to parents who met, married and started a family while evading German troops.
It’s an almost decade-long saga of toughness and against-the-odds survival. The young family lives underground for months in one of the many Ukrainian caves where resistance fighters and others find refuge. Then, after Greenblat’s mother is injured by shrapnel during a skirmish with German soldiers and in need of medical attention, they travel across Eastern Europe by foot and horse-drawn cart, often sick and hungry and avoiding capture. They arrive in Russia, where Greenblat’s father spends two years in a Russian prison for stealing a loaf of bread from the bakery where he works.
Then, there is a daring escape from Russia under cover of darkness in a packed cattle car to a U.S.-run displaced persons camp in Austria. There, a comatose Greenblat is handed to a camp nurse who tells his parents he is unlikely to survive. But he does, and five years later, the family, now with three children, find their way to safety in the United States.

In his talks, Greenblat doesn’t shy away from the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The audience hears how his fathers’ entire family was wiped out in a concentration camp gas chamber and most of his mother’s family by German firing squad.
“When I stand in front of you and tell you how my family was murdered,” he says, “you, and everybody in this room is my witness. Five, 10 years from now there won’t be someone able to stand here. And you’ll be able to say, ‘I heard it. It happened.’”
But, as essential as bearing witness is, Greenblat’s eye is on the future and teaching these kids that their actions matter. “There is no room for hatred, there is no room for discrimination. We have got to get this world a little bit better,” he tells them.
“I thought that this was a very enlightening experience,” says 13-year-old Riverbirch Middle School student Alisa Ivanovska, who had come from Suwanee to hear Greenblat speak.
At the Mount Vernon School in Sandy Springs a few days later, Greenblat spoke to the entire middle school before taking part in The Daffodil Project, planting daffodils to honor the children lost in the Holocaust. His audience is changed by hearing him speak. You can see it in the way they listen, and in the reverence with which they line up to shake his hand and thank him afterwards.

“His story was super inspiring and so adventurous and so brave, and I really like how he gave us a message to go forward,” says eighth grader Ella Medlin.
Andrea Videlefsky, founder and president of The Daffodil Project, which has planted more than one million daffodils, says of Greenblat, “He’s kind, caring … and he develops the most incredible relationships with each of the students that he speaks to.”
Greenblat is tireless, a man with a purpose, not only speaking at The Breman numerous times a week but also with The Daffodil Project and Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, both of which take him all over Georgia. There are many other speaking engagements, to students at Georgia State and Kennesaw State universities as well as to organizations in many other states. Last year, he was invited to attend the International March of the Living, where he marched from Auschwitz to a subcamp of Birkenau with students from all over the world. There, with his granddaughter by his side, Greenblat broke down in tears in the gas chamber. This work he does is hard.
Ironically, until about a decade ago, Greenblat never talked about his background. He was busy, he says, working and raising a family. It wasn’t until after he retired, when he saw “No Place on Earth,” a documentary about a family that survived living in the caves of Ukraine, that his history came back to him.
“Sitting there and all of a sudden, watching this movie, my whole life flashed,” he says. Afterward, during the question-and-answer session, Greenblat found himself raising his hand and telling his story for the first time. A few days later, he got a phone call asking him if he’d like to be a speaker at The Breman Museum. Now, he is a man reborn.
The reason that I continue to educate is that I want them to know that what happened was for only one reason — hate. We have to do everything in our being to bring hatred to a stop and bring respect for everyone.
Greenblat has become a grandfather figure to many of the teens he’s met during his talks and travels. His phone is full of texts from them, checking in, telling him their news. After Oct. 7, when one young woman decided to spend a year in Israel instead of going to her first year of college, she told Greenblat it was because of him and his story.
For Greenblat, the future is bright. When he speaks to young audiences, he always tells them about his ulterior motive for being there. “His name is Eli, my great-grandson. He’s in the second grade. I want to make a better world for him. And you all are going to do it.”
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