Sam Jonas is well-known in the ATM industry, having built independent ATM operator Cash Resources into a $25 million business before selling it to eFunds (now part of Fidelity Information Services) in 2002.
But his latest venture has nothing to do with financial services.
Jonas says he’s taking a break from the financial services business to focus on publishing a work that he holds close to his heart.
Josef Laufer
The work in question is called “The Fields of Ukraine.” It’s a biography of Yosef Laufer, a Holocaust survivor from Zurawno, Ukraine. Jonas’ grandmother, Lottie Spinner Jonas, grew up in Zurawno but left the village before World War II. Jonas and his brother, Ted, stumbled across Laufer’s story while visiting Zurawno for genealogical research.
Laufer, a teenager when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, narrowly escaped deporation to a death camp. He and his father spent the next three years hiding in the fields and forests around their village.
Jonas didn’t write the book. A year after their visit to Zurawno, a cousin found a biography of Laufer written by another Holocaust survivor, Haim Tal. Problem was, it was available only in Hebrew. It took them three years to find Laufer and get Tal’s permission to translate the book into English. They also conducted some additional interviews of Zurawno residents and incorporated them into the English version.
The book has already had an impact on at least some readers. Here’s what happened to one of them, Ralph Seliger:
To my shock, my long deceased maternal grandparents (victims of the Holocaust), suddenly appeared in the pages of a book I was reading….
My grandparents hid together from Jew-hunting “actions” for several months in the Stryj ghetto – along with Yosef Laufer, his father, and another young man. This, in part, is how Laufer describes their existence and my grandmother’s role in keeping them alive:
At night we would collect scraps of food left by those who had been rounded up. We also collected items of clothing and other useful things which we bartered for wheat or cereal. We would crush the grain by using a special kind of grater and in this way we were able to produce flour and then bake something that was edible.
Mrs. Reiss was a noble but also a very pedantic woman. She prepared food for all of us from the bits we could get hold of. She washed our clothes and tried to keep the house clean.
Laufer recounts my grandparents being captured by Ukrainian guards while escaping the Stryj ghetto.
The book is available online at www.fieldsofukraine.com.
