Harry Eisen, 1917–2012

Harry Eisen arrived in the U.S. after World War II, an impoverished Holocaust survivor who spoke no English. But he did not let that stop him from buying 100 chickens and starting an egg business that would grow to be one of the biggest in California. “I talked Jewish to my chickens,” he later joked, “and they laid eggs.”

Eisen was born in Poland and left home at 13 to work in a sausage factory, said the Riverside, Calif., Press-Enterprise. He was conscripted into the Polish cavalry before war broke out, but later recalled, “with his trademark irony, that a horse was no match for a Nazi armored tank.” He was captured and sent to work in a labor camp coal mine. In 1942 he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He escaped during a “death march” to another camp in January 1945, having seen his entire family but a single brother perish in the death camps.

Eisen and his wife, Hilda, immigrated to the U.S. in 1948, said the Los Angeles Times, but he could “only get a job cleaning out meat barrels in a hot-dog factory.” He scraped together enough cash to buy his first 100 hens, and began peddling eggs on a bicycle in his neighborhood. From those humble beginnings, Eisen built his company into Norco Ranch, “one of the state’s leading egg producers, processors, and distributors.” He sold it to Land O’Lakes in 2000 for a seven-figure sum.

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“It’s the American dream,” said Steve Nathan, a former city councilman in Norco, Calif., and a friend of Eisen. “He started small with a bunch of chickens, he worked hard and became a multimillionaire.”