Boris Gremont
Boris Gremont was born in 1947 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His father was from Lithuania and emigrated alone at age 18, already a qualified electrician; when his ship arrived in Cape Town, the relative who had encouraged him to come never appeared, and he began life in a new country alone and without the language. He made his way to Johannesburg and boarded in a house owned by Boris's grandmother, where he met Boris's mother. His mother had been sent by boat to South Africa at age five with her older sister and later placed in a Jewish orphanage. Much of his father's family was lost in the Holocaust, including a grandmother who disappeared at a train station. Years later, a friend traveling in Sao Paulo discovered that Boris's father's brother had survived and was living in Brazil, and the two brothers were reunited.
Boris grew up in Johannesburg and spent about six years living with relatives on a farm, where he attended a school that taught only in Afrikaans and used paraffin lamps, so that he would become fully fluent in the language his family believed essential to a future in South Africa. He returned home to finish high school, then served nine months in an engineering corps in the military. Afterward he traveled through about 18 countries in Europe with a childhood neighbor, and his mother registered him for college, ultimately enrolling him as an accountant, the profession he practiced ever after though he retained a lifelong love of engineering. He met Joan in college in Johannesburg and married her in 1971, and their two children were born in South Africa.
Facing the daily uncertainty of life under apartheid, including going to work with a pistol and restrictions on moving wealth abroad, Boris and Joan decided to emigrate while their children were still young. Getting into the United States was difficult, requiring visitor trips and a job offer that had to be advertised. After scouting the country and briefly considering Houston, they settled in Dallas, drawn by South African Jewish friends who urged them to stay. The tight-knit South African community shared donated household goods with each newly arrived family. Boris recalled experiencing anti-semitism in South Africa, and a formative moment during his military service when a commanding officer, after Israel's 1967 war, ordered the unit to respect its Jewish soldiers. He counts meeting Joan, joining her family, and their two children and three grandchildren as the happiest part of his life.
Full Transcript
nineteen forty-seven Johannes bird South Africa let's go back what do you remember when you were a little kid out there I remember my house I remember my parents I remember some of the things we did in the house I especially remember and I must have been just a few years old when Sputnik was launched by the Russians and my father had a great love of Russia and he would stand out for hours and hours and hours and try and see split my passing over South Africa wow so did your dad was originally from Russia he was from lithonia okay and what did they come down
so your mom 2 i'm assuming my mom was from lithuania they were interestingly enough from very towns that were very close in lithuania but they never knew one another until I met in South Africa know that they come down the road a quarter with their parents moved back down with my father emigrated on his own he came when he was 18 years old he was already a qualified electrician in I guess Lithuania and came to South Africa re qualified as an electrician but the interesting story with him was when his steamer got into Cape Town he was meant to meet the relative who had told
him to come the relative was not at the docks when he arrived he found himself all alone and for the rest of his life never ever spoke to that relative again he just never could get over the fact that he couldn't speak the language he was coached and encouraged to come to South Africa and they never met him and and he couldn't make on with them so he was here alone he was here alone he was 18 years old couldn't read or write it's not the language certainly couldn't speak the language at all yeah so how did he get by day to day from the
beginning I only know that he made his way up to Johannesburg presumably by train and stayed in a boarding house in a what is now a seedy part of Janice burg but what was then a very big Jewish community of Janice Berg and the boarding house owner was my grandmother and that's where he met my mother wow that's interesting here now his parents did his parents eventually come down to South Africa or do they stay back in them between Ian his entire family was lost in the Holocaust my father still had a great affinity to other immigrants from Lithuania and one of his friends in
Janice Berg came to visit us one Sunday and we had this big farewell tea for him he was going to go to South Paulo Brazil on business and we had this great farewell and he left and good few months later this friend came back and came to tell us all about his came to tell my father all about his experience in Cipolla and he said that while he was there he met a gentleman in Sao Paulo who believed his relative his brother had left and gone to South Africa and he was asked to help him find him and my father asked him who are you
looking for and he said I'm looking for max for Eric para Montes and my father said that's me so he had found my father's brother who had given it he had given him up as lost in the Holocaust he had found him in Sao Paulo as a displaced citizen and for the first time my father realized that his only one relative had actually survived that's amazing so to take the story further which my family already know my father wrote to his now newfound brother and we found out that he had to live in Brazil for 15 years in order to become a citizen in Brazil
but my father told him that at that time they were he had two sons and he was living in Johannesburg and the first thing my father did my mind chol did you found uncle was send a wooden box full with a new train set I still own the box and the train sets Wow and I have built that up into a huge huge huge set which I am trying to find a hospital to donate it to to to to run it your dad's family that were lost in the Holocaust where were they living when the war broke out I don't really know there is a
story that my father had told of at one point they were on a train and this is presumably when my father was younger than 18 because he hadn't yet emigrated the whole family was on a train and his mother got off the train at a train stop I don't have to go buy something or go to the restroom but she never got on the train and they never ever heard from her again she was lost at that train station or taken away and that is how he lost his mother did your dad talk much about this he really didn't but the shame of the whole
story is after waiting 15 years for my uncle to in fact they got it shortened I think to 10 years and my uncle who was found in Sao Paulo came to South Africa and we had a fairly small house so I shared a bedroom with him and we would lay at night and he would tell stories in in the most unbelievable detail the only problem is they were only in Yiddish or he could speak Russian and German so that was always in a foreign language and being young you don't realize how important birth stories are so I have very very little memory of all those
stories well what can you tell us about your mom's side of the family my mother air was five years old and had an 10 year old sister and she was put on a boat and sent to relatives in South Africa and told to wait in South Africa until her mother arrived my mother's father died when she was 12 years 12 days old so she never knew her father never knew anything about her father until she started doing her own research and she found that her father was a very very well respected rabbinical scholar and had a very very reputation as being a rabbinical scholar in
Lithuania and as part of her immigration process into South Africa she mentioned the name to people who came from Lithuania and they knew of him or the other thing is when she and her sister came to South Africa my grandmother could not look after them so she put them in an orphanage in a Jewish orphanage in Johannesburg we have since found numerous parents of our contemporaries and numerous people who have been in the orphanage with my mother so your journey bringing you eventually to the United States having a career to family here that's through your family history was quite a journey it's quite a journey
and it's also I think probably driven by what I saw them go through to say at some point we're going to have to make it let's make an immigration earlier rather than later in other words don't let your children grow up or don't stay here long enough where the country goes through such political turmoil that you can't leave which too late to leave all right well let's get into that so you're growing up in your hands Berg where did you go to school I went to the I went to kindergarten a kindergarten very very well-known kindergarten called bernad patli in Johannesburg I then went to
primary school to standard to which is fourth grade and I joke about it and say my parents took me out because I wanted to punish me but they sent me to relatives on a farm where they never spoke English at all there was no English on the farm the farm and the farm labourers and the local school I went to only spoke off Rukh Khan's and had no electricity we used pumping paraffin lamps to have electricity and I stayed there for about six years commute back home I was about maybe 80 miles away from home but I would commute back some weekends to see the
family and their idea was that in order to be successful in South Africa for the future you had to be fully fluent in Afrikaans Johannesburg and the Jewish community in Johannesburg really didn't care much for Afrikaans and they wanted me to to to learn the language well enough that I could be one hundred percent proficient in it because that was the way south africa was going since the Afrikaans government came into power in 1948 and they could see the writing was on the wall so after the six years now then take you through high school that took me through what would be standard 82 years
before final getting completing high school ok ok and then you went back home the complete high school went back home to complete high school and then you went on to college I went to the military for nine months spent my nine months in the military in an engineering core loved engineering always wanted to be an engineer and signed up for engineering and spent nine months in one small town in South Africa doing my military training ok then you come back home and then went to school I came back home the day after military training completed a friend of mine a fellow by the name of
oh and belcher who interestingly enough I was born a next-door neighbor to him in Johannesburg where I was born and grew up he was our next-door neighbor we were the same age we took a trip to Europe and covered about 18 countries over a nine-month period and ended up in Israel penniless without an air ticket to come back since we sold our head ticket at that time you could do that we sold our return it etiquette to buy a used car we could travel around Europe and then called on our parents to send money so we could come home and there you go there you
go what did you meet your wife I met in college in college in Johannesburg ok and then why don't you guys get married we got married on 71 in 1971 in Johannesburg okay and then what did you get into when I went overseas I had a register for my return to go back into college so I called up my mother from overseas and I said to her please register me for college she said I've never been to your campus it's a huge campus tell me where to go and what doing what to do so I told her I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be
an accountant or an engineer register me for both and when I get back I'll make a decision so called a few weeks later and said did you go she said yes I went I registered you for being an accountant but I couldn't find the engineering buildings I guess you're going to be an accountant and that is why I'm an accountant today but i still love engineering well i'm basing amazing well now you settle down you have both your kids born and some help kids born in South Africa okay yes what was the decision to come to the United States I mean you have a family
you have a career going why leave probably the most pervasive reason is living in South Africa every day is an uncertain day every day you're thinking about if I build my wealth here I'll never be able to take my wealth out the South African government had put restrictions on taking any wealth after country so you had a question the wisdom of building wealth and then leaving it behind when you run or you say to yourself if I stay here then I need to try and get money out and then the expression for that was are you slipping guilt and and the idea was to try
and squirrel money out the country so that if you had to leave and you were penniless at least you had something screwed all the way somewhere and also until the time we left South Africa I never ever went to work without a pistol strapped to my uncle wow so you were always in a tenuous situation from a security point of view you were always worried about whether tomorrow the revolution was going to start and you always worried that if you had to run I would be starting in another country and being penniless in another country so what made your choice America unbeknown to people who
live in this country America is the dream of everybody everybody wants to come here and I think that is because of the movies I think you you see the movies and you think this is so glorious this is where I have to go and the only difficulty is the difficulty of getting into this country but if this country did open its gates everybody would flow here what movie did you see that did you say we're going to the United States it's virtually any and every movie even if you saw a movie like Exodus which is based in Israel you knew america produced it you knew
that if a country can do that what else can they do right right ok so you guys make the decision to come here how hard was it to get here incredibly difficult first of all the restrictions were just Lynn place today is you can come into America to see America but you can't come to Erica with the intention of emigrating to America unless you have a visa with intention of looking for a job so you come here as a visitor but your avowed intention is to be a visitor and and you almost if you see anything that looks interesting from a business point of view
you're almost not allowed to look at it because that would give you an interest in coming here and you can't do that you also have to come here with a with the proposition to the government that you're not going to take a Labor Department that you're not going to take away an American's job which means that you have to get a job offer that job offer had to be advertised in local and one national paper at the job requirement and the salary that you interested in and if a merry any American could pull the job you didn't get it so so you had a tough
process to go through that all was would always was very uncertain whether what you were doing and the people you were meeting and the people who are offering you jobs would ultimately be able to give you the job where did you wind up first when you came here well going through our first trip was through the west coast second clip was East Coast third trip was mid america and the fourth trip and which is our searching trip we started off in Houston and I had a college buddy who had inherited an absolute untold fortune of money he and his wife had moved to houston we
lived with them they were so desperately unhappy that we decided is very unhappy and then have all these millions we can never be happy here we need to move on we came to dallas we met a few South African Jewish South Africans here one of whom was a college buddy of mine and they said your apps not leaving the study we're going to get you to stay and they helped me I stay now when you were making these trips the United States were you coming with your small children all the time no how hard was that to leave the kids and travel to the other
side of the world incredibly difficult especially because the kids were one was an absolute newborn baby and the other was a two-year-old which made it incredibly difficult to do but we left the kids with Jones parents and it worked out well they were seasoned travelers they had traveled every year across the world so they knew what we were doing they understood why we were doing it and they were couldn't got better pair of babysitters when you finally moved to Dallas to the Jewish community embrace you guys the South African Jewish community were incredible because we were all in the same boat together everybody was trying
to figure out how to get things done how to meet people how to get entrenched and established here did not have much success with the established Jewish community in Dallas I think they were not seasoned to the immigration process but the South Africans all had donated pots and pans and various other accessories to a home so when the next family arrived the first thing that would happen is they would get delivered all these items on loan until they got somewhat established and then they would be returned or increased for the next family to arrive how big of a culture shock was it for you the
differences you know you're in dallas compared to back home huge the the when you live outside this country you look at america as one country with a a homogeneous population and you find out not only is every region different but they're different accents there is very little commonality between the south and the north east and the west coast and the business culture is night and day compared to South Africa now I understand them talking to other people that you guys really didn't have television available to you until like the 70s television was launched in 1976 with a single channel and so how much of the
outside world information were you really getting the best that we were getting was British Movietone news in the movies and maybe some American movies that you were going to watch that that you could at least see some of what the outside world was like but everybody who was trying to get to the right of passage which was a trip to Europe which I had done right when I had finished my military training and there were a lot of our bodies were bringing in contraband things like contraband magazines and maybe a few movies and and one incident in particular is a great movie a Sydney potty
a movie called guess who's coming to dinner I was banned in South Africa because it had interracial relationships well I at that time honed a chain of stores that were selling televisions and I managed to get a contraband copy of that and we had we showed it in somebody's house and we had posted our friends as gods on the corner of the block in case the police came to do a raid that we could at least get rid of the movie was so it was difficult to get outside information how long did it take you and Joan to get acclimated the United States before you
felt like you just melt it in and run your way as long as you keep on saying I think we've settled down you have not settled down when you stop saying that then you have settled down because you're not aware right the fact that you saw an immigrant and so that's about five years so talk about five yeah now behind you is a little prop from South Africa yes what is that this is a vuvuzela this controversy whether it was developed in South Africa or somebody and I think it's in Spain who developed this the fact of the matter is South Africa popularized it beyond
anyone's imagination because at the world cup in 2012 in 2010 at the World Cup everybody had a vuvuzela and everybody blue these things and since these games were being shown worldwide the world became acquainted with the vuvuzela and the first thing the rest of the world did was they banned them I don't get a shock it is a constant buzz like bees buzzing in a hive the entire way through the game Oh in your lifetime you've lived through so many momentous occasions coming to the United States obviously was one we had a 911 a terrible tragedy you know closer to home for you these the
seven day war in Israel six-day war in Israel what really affected your life what did you really take notice of while we were living in South Africa a lot of my friends didn't experiences because they were insulated in johannesburg in a very very tight-knit jewish community and i had what spent my real formative years from fourth grade 2 10th grade in that tight knit community I experienced a lot of anti-semitism and what changed dramatically was Israel success in the war because while I was in the military there were constant feelings and expressions of anti-semitism amongst the few Zhu Zhu in in the in the military
and the interesting factor that was on Friday nights the military allowed the Jews to go and to go to synagogue to go to prayers on Friday night and also interestingly enough you could go and spend the evening at a Jewish family having a Shabbat dinner well when we only had 16 Jews in our unit for friday nights there were always about 38 or 55 Jews volunteer so called Jews volunteering to be Jewish to get to get out of the camp and to go to to prayers and and to dinner but one thing that stands out and then I'll never forget is we're on the parade
ground and there must have been a few thousand of us standing in the Sun and the commanding officer called for all Jews to step forward well a whole rustling of nervousness and one or two step forward and he says every Jew who's standing here on this parade ground step forward so ultimately all 16 of us stepped forward he said I want you to come to the front and we thought this is the this is a really really big problem nothing would experience before and we came to the front standing right with him and he said turn around and face the whole parade ground which we
did and he said to everybody I want you to watch these 16 Jews very carefully they know how to fight if you look what Israel had just done and we had just won the war it was a 67 war he said you need to show some respect for these guys and that was a big big turnaround for me yeah that's great yeah you almost became insulated you became revered amongst the troops happiest time in your life meeting my wife and becoming one of her family two kids three grandkids what advice do you want to leave for the next generation I'd say to my kids and
my grandchildren enjoy your relationships while you can you don't realize how quickly you grow up and how quickly your family moves on did a great job appreciate you do this today thank you thanks very much you