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Jewish Community News

News: December 2005

69-year-old Holocaust survivor finds stiff competition as realtor

By Cecily Ruttenberg

During the innocent years between 5 and 8, Boris Kapilevitch spent every waking moment hiding from Nazi soldiers, searching for scraps of food to stay alive, and bearing witness to unspeakable horrors. By comparison, it would seem that competing to make a living as a realtor in the Silicon Valley would be easy. But life does not operate by comparison.

For Boris and his second wife Larisa Blank, trying to make ends meet in their relatively new life in the United States is quite a struggle. Nearing ages 69 and 58 respectively, the couple stretch each month to pay their mortgage on the small Los Gatos town home they purchased five years ago. Laid off from a programming position several years ago, Larisa bakes pastries and works part-time at the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley. Boris is competing against hundreds of realtors.

Although the real estate market has been booming the last five years, Boris has been unable to create a solid business for himself. Real estate success, most people will agree, has much to do with connections. Five years new to the area, Boris has relatively few.

“And then there’s my accent,” he says. “One time a person call the office and when I answer, they ask if there is anyone available who speaks English.”

Boris has analyzed his situation from every possible angle. “Other people who speak different languages will sell to that community and do well,” Boris reflects. “I try contacting the Russians but they are not responsive.”

Despite a fleeting collection of clients, those who do choose Boris are amazed by his tenacity, loyalty and commitment. This is no surprise. His early years in the Holocaust and adolescence in an extremely anti-Semitic Russia taught Boris that nothing comes easily. One must work hard to achieve what s/he wants.

World War II

Boris vividly recalls the eve of World War II. He was a 5-year-old boy living happily in Minsk, Russia with his mother, father and older brother. “On the first day of the war I heard my mother screaming, ‘the war has started, the war.’ I did not know what war meant, but I knew by her voice that it was something very bad.”

Almost immediately, the Russian Army drafted Boris’ father Morduch. Days later Nazi solders took Boris’ mother Elizabet to join a “column,” a work group of anywhere from 50-200 Jews healthy enough to work.

Boris and his older brother sat home alone all day until his mother would return each night, sometimes not for days at a time, exhausted from her labors.

Minsk was a township of approximately 280,000 people, Boris recalls. About 90,0000, or every third person was Jewish. Soon after the war began, Jews with relatives someplace else, left. With no money and no family, Boris’ family stayed in their home. One morning they woke up to see a wire fence surrounding their neighborhood. Overnight, they found themselves in a ghetto.

Sitting today at the kitchen table of his lovingly decorated town home, Boris recalls what it was like to be left by himself.

“It is so hard to explain, it was kind of acceptable. I knew that she was going to work and that I was going to be home alone, and it is just what I remember,” said Boris.

But the worst was still to come. Boris was the one to notice the Nazis in front of his house while his mother was at work. “My brother told me, ‘go hide.’ I told him to come with me but he said he needed to stay with this old woman who was living with us. I went and hid under the bed. The Nazis came in and took my brother and the old lady.”

The Nazis took Boris’ brother and the old lady to a specially designed car that pumped carbon monoxide into its interior with the sole purpose of executing people. And just like that, Boris’ 12-year-old brother Leonid was no longer.

“I remember for two or three days I was lying under the bed,” Boris says. “I was afraid to get out of the house. Until mommy came home I didn’t leave this place. I remember at one point I came out and found a piece of bread and then went back to hide.”

Boris saw that awful car many more times in his neighborhood. One day the car parked in front of his house again. Boris managed to climb the walls, without a ladder, in order to reach the attic that adjoined other attics from homes on either side. Neighbors with the same idea were already there, and attempted to push Boris back down. Somehow Boris proved stronger and scrambled up to the attic.

“People lose so many human qualities, like kindness,” Boris says sadly.
Boris shamefully recalls losing his own kindness. He and his mother had become terribly ill and found themselves in a hospital in the ghetto.

After several days, Boris awoke (next to his mother, who was also ill) and saw that someone had left a single bowl of soup. His mother was attempting to reach the soup from her hospital bed.

“My own mother,” Boris pauses, heavy with sadness. “And I grabbed the soup and I say it’s mine, it’s mine.”

The memory brings tears. His eyes squint with pain. We sit quietly.
“I never forgive myself,” Boris says, meeting my eyes with a search for my understanding. “You become almost inhuman in those situations.”

Home in Los Gatos

Today Boris sits before a table with hand-baked cakes, courtesy of his wife Larisa, glass mugs filled with tea, and a little china plate with thin lemon slices and a mound of sugar.

Boris thanks his wife and finishes a small plate of cake.
I ask Boris about the contrast between these delightful treats, and his early years of nearly dying of starvation.

“We adjust ourselves,” he explains. “It is not forgotten. It cannot be forgotten. But we live with certain duties. We have to take care of kids, life and support ourselves.”

Nevertheless, Boris says he cannot erase the hunger from his memory. In fact, most of his memories of the war ar related to fear and hunger. During the war, he and his mother boiled grass picked from the sidewalk; they traded all their clothes for food; they ate bread so thick with mold it was unrecognizable.

To this day Boris remembers a hamburger. He and his mother had not eaten for days. They were walking across the ghetto when they passed a house where they smelled fried meat. Six-year-old Boris stopped and would not move from in front of the house. His mother called, but he would not move. Finally she knocked on the door of the house. A woman who answered brought out a piece of hamburger and handed it to Boris.

“That hamburger was tastier than any cake on this table,” Boris says.

Joining the Partisans

Eventually it became too dangerous for Boris to stay home alone all day. All the other children and seniors in his neighborhood had been executed. He began to accompany his mom to work with her column. Because this was against the rules, he would travel in the middle of the column, squished between dozens of Jewish women who pushed together to shield Boris from view.

Once at the work site, Boris would scramble around, attempting to stay out of sight. One day, a young soldier overseeing the column called Boris’ mother and told her to take Boris and leave. A group of soldiers would be arriving soon and they would not be spared. Boris and his mother set off, not knowing where they were going or what would happen.

As Boris says, “this is another book.” They slept in barns, begged for food and wandered for weeks looking for a safe place to stop running. Everyone they met told them their only hope was to join the partisans, small rogue resistance groups that operated out of the forest and fought the Nazis when possible.

Many partisan groups turned Boris and his mother away because they were Jewish. Finally they found a group who took them, and this was where they stayed until the end of the war.

Boris’ memories of living with the partisans are not terrible. He and his mother lived with other families and kids in a groove in the ground of the forest. They essentially dug out a giant hole, and made a roof out of branches, dirt and leaves. Boris remembers that with the partisans he first learned to ride a horse. He remembers traveling into nearby villages and taking food from farms - sometimes they asked, sometimes they did not. He also remembers five German soldiers that the partisans captured, who lived in a hole nearby. When the war ended one of the partisans took the soldiers and killed them. Boris recalls this execution with the mixed emotion of someone who has lived through the Holocaust. Boris and his mother later reunited with his father in Minsk.

“I was just in fear, constant fear,” Boris recalls. “People who didn’t experience war, or death of execution, death by hatred, it’s a completely different story.”

Starting a new life

Boris’ new life with Larisa began in 1995 in Chicago. Larisa had emigrated from Kiev, Russia 10 years earlier in 1985, and was now studying at a college. After the war Boris moved to Israel, then to South Africa. He came to the United States to visit his sister, who introduced him to her acquaintance Larisa. Seven days after they met, they were married.

Larisa recalls, “Boris said to me, ‘you know what Larisa, we are not youngsters anymore, we don’t have a lot of time for dating. If you want to be with me just let me know.’”

Boris remembers that after just half-an-hour together he thought, “I’d like to marry her.”

In the early days of their new life, work came easily. Boris, whose profession in Israel and South Africa had been in mechanical engineering, found himself too old to be employed, and so he studied and earned a real estate license. Larisa had gone back to school for programming and gained a solid job at Hewitt Associated. Together the couple purchased a nice home and lived quite happily surrounded by Boris’ sister and much of Larisa’s family.

In 2000, the couple relocated to the Silicon Valley when Larisa was offered a job at Stanford University. Her mother had recently died in Chicago, and her daughter had moved to Palo Alto. Together all these reasons sent the couple to this area in 2000. They purchased their town home in Los Gatos and set off to earn a living.

Life in Silicon Valley has not been easy. Their story has no simple solution, and no perfect ending. Boris continues to work hard to make his real estate business more successful.

“I’m studying a lot,” says Boris. He pulls out a huge manual that he recently purchased with tips for being more successful in real estate. “I’m studying every day and soon I’m going to implement these ideas.”
With no pension or savings, Boris and Larisa imagine that they will continue working for the rest of their lives. With the wisdom of his years and experience, Boris is not deterred by this thought.

“This is life,” he says. “It is called life.”

“Everything that is bad that happens, all that good happens and success. It is life.”

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