When they came to America, "no one talked about the past," said Dr. Ostern, who was 11 at the time. "We were starting a new future. That was it."

Neither brother knew of the other until a cousin of Marek Ostern learned from his mother that Henryk Ostern had been married before. The brother in Poland began doing Internet searches on the family name, landing on a hit for the father through Dr. Ostern's participation in "Portraits of Survival," an exhibition sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara.

The exhibit, completed two years ago, tells the stories of local Holocaust survivors through pictures, testimonials and other artifacts. It has received wide publicity on the Internet, in newspapers and through other media, and was even developed by UCSB students into a film that debuted this winter.

"We always talk about the kids and school groups that come (on field trips to see the exhibit)," said Elizabeth Wolfson, director of education at the Federation. "The part of this exhibit that we haven't publicized or talked about much is how the survivors' lives have changed."

As children, most were told not talk about the Holocaust. Dr. Ostern, a retired physician, is no exception.

Back then, the horror of what Jewish families endured was too raw to face, he said. His father never talked about what happened to him between 1939, when he was recruited into the Russian military, and 1944, when the war ended. He died 18 years ago.

When the Germans invaded Dr. Ostern's Polish town in 1941, about 12,000 Jews -- one-third of the population -- were shuffled into ghettos guarded with barbed wire. Each day, German soldiers would drive by, recruiting people for "work" camps, where they were killed.

Dr. Ostern, his mother, an uncle and a few cousins managed to escape the ghetto, thanks to help from a soldier.

They fled to a bunker that had been built when the war broke out -- just in case.

It was stocked with a meager supply of food, mostly canned products and dry goods. They had no idea that they would be living there for two full years, never seeing daylight.

They paid a Polish man to supply food through two chimneys, which also served as their air supply.

The sandy floor turned to mud in the winter, rats became their friends, and holes in the ground turned to cesspools of human waste.

"People often ask me what we did down there," said the soft-spoken Dr. Ostern. "The answer is, we did nothing but exist. We thought about when our next meal was coming."

After the war, Dr. Ostern's uncle learned that his brother-in-law, also a doctor, was still alive and living in a nearby city. Henryk Ostern had married a woman he worked with, but other details of his experience are a mystery.

His wife at the time was six months pregnant, and is still alive and living in Poland.

Later this month, Dr. Ostern and his wife, Edith, also a Holocaust survivor, may get more answers.

They will stay with Dr. Ostern's brother for three days, and then travel around Poland for about two weeks.

They expect the experience to be surreal.

"It's going to be very emotional," Dr. Ostern said. "The war did a lot of things to a lot of people. A lot of movies have been made about this sort of thing, but this really happened. It's not fiction."

e-mail: mevans@newspress.com

Santa Barbara man who survived Holocaust is heading for Poland to meet half brother he never knew existed
MELISSA EVANS, NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER July 16, 2006 7:14 AM

Santa Barbara man who survived Holocaust is heading for Poland to meet half brother he never knew existed

Stan Ostern's story has the trappings of a Hollywood drama: He lived in a Polish ghetto for a year, somehow escaping the daily roundups that led to the deaths of thousands of Jews; he fled with his family and spent two years in a sweltering bunker, living among rats; he came to the United States completely illiterate and went on to earn a doctorate.

This latest turn is even more astounding. Dr. Ostern's father apparently remarried after being told that his family had been killed in the Holocaust. When Henryk Ostern discovered that his wife and only son were alive after World War II, he left his new bride and came to New York with his first family.

Dr. Ostern, 71, didn't know any of this until last September, when he received a strange e-mail: A man named Marek Ostern was looking for family after Googling the name Henryk Ostern.

Dr. Ostern has a half-brother he didn't know existed. The two will meet for the first time this month in Poland, a country Dr. Ostern hasn't seen in 61 years.

"It's unbelievable," said Dr. Ostern, who has lived in Santa Barbara for 40 years.

He is feeling a mixture of emotions: shock, happiness, sadness. He can't imagine what his father went through, making the decision to leave his new family for the one he thought had been killed.