Samuel Greene papers

Samuel Greene (1914-2013) was born Szmuel Grynblat in Sławatycze, Poland. In the 1930s, Greene served apprenticeships as a furrier. After being imprisoned and tortured for his progressive political beliefs, Greene traveled to Warsaw looking for work. While in Warsaw, Greene met Regina Kawer. They married two and a half months before Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. When the Polish government called for men to move east in order to regroup to fight the advancing German army, Greene traveled to Bialystok, which soon fell under the control of the Soviet Union. Regina Greene, whose blonde hair and blue eyes allowed her to escape Nazi scrutiny, was able to travel through Nazi-held territory to join him.

The Greenes were eventually rounded up by the Soviets and transported in cattle cars thousands of miles to Siberia. There they were imprisoned in a labor camp and worked as slaves, felling and shipping trees, and later surreptitiously boarded a train to another camp in the Ural Mountains, where Samuel Greene was forced to work in the mines. Greene was able to bribe a Soviet official with a cigarette lighter to secure his and Regina's passage to Samarqand, Uzbekistan. Living conditions there were better, but once again Greene was imprisoned, this time for black marketeering, only to be released with Regina's help.

At the end of the war, the Greenes returned to Poland. Most of their family members were gone, but Regina managed to reunite with her sister Edith, who had changed her name to Maria when she acquired false papers as an Aryan. In 1947, after a short stay in a displaced persons camp in Vienna, the Greenes moved into private housing, where their first son, Leonard, was born. In 1948, Regina's aunt and uncle, Edith and Louis Toporek, sponsored the couple's immigration to Charleston, South Carolina.