The Last Sunrise; The Meaning of Macintosh



Author: Guy Kawasaki

Date: June, 1994

Keywords: D-Day sunrise feature

Text:
June 6 is the 50 year commemoration of D-Day, the beginning of the end
of World War II. Lest we forget.- Ed.
     If you were to believe recent business publications, you would
think that the only important news about Apple is how many Macintoshes
have been sold, how much money has been made (or lost), and how many
employees have been laid off. These publications are wrong. Harold
Gordon, and others like him, are what's important about Macintosh.
     Harold Gordon is a Holocaust survivor whose only crime was being a
Jew when the Nazis were trying to conquer the world. In 1993, shortly
after retiring from running a service station in Salinas, California
for forty years, Gordon self-published The Last Sunrise.  He
self-published the book because when he contacted established
publishers, they told him to get a agent, but thirty agents turned him
down. Were it not for Macintosh, his story may have never been told.
     I first met Harold Gordon as he was standing in a bookstore in
Monterey, California, hawking his book. Since my wife and I have soft
spots for authors, he reeled us in for two copies. We got to talking,
and I found out that he is a member of Club Macintosh of Monterey. He
wrote and printed his book and runs his business with a Centris 650 and
a NEC Silentwriter. (Gordon's not stupid: he didn't buy a IIvx.) 
     Gordon grew up in Grodno, Poland, a city of 60,000 people of whom
about one-third were Jews. His father was a barber; his mother, a
homemaker. He had a brother who was eighteen months younger. In
September 1939, when Gordon was eight years old, the Nazis attacked
Grodno. Soon afterward, the Russians made a nonaggression pact with
Germany to partition Poland, and Russia received the part of Poland
that contained Grodno. Now the Gordons thought they would be safe from
the Nazis;  however, in June 1941 the Nazis took over Grodno. One of
the Nazis' first acts after conquer-ing the territory was to round up
Grodno's 20,000 Jews and to im-prison them in a Jewish ghetto
completely surrounded by a brick wall.
     One night, the entire Gordon family and about 3,000 other Jews
were marched out of the ghetto to a detention camp called Kelbasin.
Gordon and his father were able to escape from this camp, but they were
separated from his mother and brother. Gordon never saw his mother or
brother again. After their escape, Gordon and his father had nowhere to
go except back to the ghetto in Grodno. They hid in the ghetto until
all 20,000 Jews had been removed by the Nazis-and then, for lack of a
better plan, they walked seventy miles to another Jewish ghetto, called
Bialystok.
     In 1942 the Nazis transported Gordon and his father from Bialystok
to one of the infamous death camps, Buchenwald, where they worked as
camp barbers, shaving the heads of fellow prisoners to reduce problems
with lice. Nine months later they were transported to another death
camp-Auschwitz-to be executed. Gordon and his father were in line to be
gassed when they were pulled out by a Nazi officer to work in the
crematorium as laborers. One of their tasks was to retrieve the clothes
of fellow prisoners after they had been ordered to strip and step into
the gas chamber. They lived in Auschwitz for one year.
     In 1943, when Gordon was thirteen, he and his father were
transported from Auschwitz to Oraninburg, a detention camp near a Nazi
airplane factory. After Allied planes destroyed the factory, Gordon and
his father were taken to Sachsenhausen where they stayed until the
spring of 1944 when they were transported to Dachau, another death
camp. By the spring of 1945, the war was going poorly for the Nazis, so
Dachau was deactivated. To dispose of the remaining prisoners, the
Nazis started them on a sixty-mile death march to Tyrol.
     On the third day of the march, two American planes attacked the
Nazi guards overseeing the prisoners, and Gordon and his father escaped
in the confusion. Early in the morning of May 5, 1945, they were
rescued by a column of American tanks as they hid in the forest from
the Nazis. At that point they were badly malnourished and near
starvation. For two months, they lived in a a Displaced Person's camp.
Eventually Gordon found a job working for a battalion of American
soldiers as a kitchen helper. After a year, Gordon and his father
accumulated $1,200 and were able to buy boat passage to the United
States. Gordon was fifteen years old when he arrived in America.
     The Last Sunrise  has soul. It is a must-read, not only for its
historical content, but because it represents the fruition of the

Macintosh vision: empowering people to think, write, communi-cate, and
play. The book could use some proofreading and editing-naughty,
naughty, Harold: use an em dash instead of two dashes-but nothing that
reading Robin Williams's The Macintosh 
     is not a typewriter  and a few hours of work couldn't fix. To
order a copy, contact Harold at H and J Publishing, P.O. Box 2253,
Salinas, CA 93902-2253, 408/422-7360, 408/422-4098 (fax), and HaroldG9
(America Online).
     And after you read The Last Sunrise-you may finish it in one
sitting-think about this: Macintosh stands for more than what Wall
Street, the business press, and even some folks at Apple could ever
understand.
          *     *     *     *     *     *
     Guy Kawasaki is a columnist at Macworld magazine. His latest book,
Hindsights, was published in December, 1993. (Harold Gordon is a
chapter in this book, so portions of this article are from the book.)
To order a copy of Hindsights, please contact Beyond Words Publishing
at 800/284-9673, 503/647-5109, or electronically at
Beyondwords@Applelink.Apple.Com.
     MUG NEWS SERVICE, 1993

Copyright © june, 1994 by Guy Kawasaki