Survivor of Nazi Germany brings his story to Spaulding
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Dr. Stephan Lewy addresses students at Spaulding High School Stefan Hard/Times Argus |
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By Stefan Hard Times Argus Staff - Published: December 22, 2008
It's not every day that high school students get to meet a piece of living history, but that's what a group of about 40 Spaulding High School students did when they hosted the remarkable Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany, Dr. Stephan Lewy.
At 83 years of age, with a dramatic early life story of escape from Nazi Germany as a Jewish child to gritty survival of the battlefields of World War II as a U.S. soldier, Lewy probably wouldn't mind being thought of as "a piece of living history." He has devoted a good part of his retirement to educating young people in schools around the country to the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust, in which an estimated six million Jews perished under Nazi persecution in the years just before and during World War II.
Spaulding history teacher Michael Stuart drove Lewy up from his Manchester, N.H., home to speak to his sophomore, junior, and senior students early last week.
Lewy's thinning gray hair, diminished hearing, and spectacles — along with his German accent – help remind his audiences of his age, but his sturdy build, erect posture, and flashes of humor make him seem too young and undamaged to have survived a nightmare childhood more than 60 years earlier. Professorial and formal in his scripted presentation, Lewy uses notes at a lecturn, an overhead projector, and clippings attached to posterboard to supplement his presentation, but he becomes more warm and engaging when taking questions from students.
Lewy's father was sent to a Nazi concentration camp very early in Adolf Hitler's reign of terror, in 1933. His mother, a Protestant, had died of natural causes two years earlier, and Stephan was already living in an orphanage. Lewy's father, Arthur, was sent to one of the first concern-tration camps established near Berlin, the German capital, and Mr. Lewy was beaten so badly that he lost all of his teeth and suffered a heart attack. The concentration camps had not yet been set up for efficient mass murder, and Lewy's father, now a medical burden, was sent back home following his heart attack.
It was not the end of the family's persecution, and Lewy recounted the relentless ratcheting up of abuse directed at Jews in Germany in the tense years leading up to World War II – in nearly each instance, Lewy paused to ask the students how they might imagine themselves in his situation as a Jewish child growing up in Nazi Germany.
How they might feel when his father returned a partially broken man from his time at a concentration camp.
How they might feel when German schools were segregated, Gentile and Jew, and Jewish children had their heads measured by their teachers, a procedure designed to provide some indication of the childrens' breeding and intelligence level in a culture that believed genetics could determine whether an individual deserved to live as a full citizen, or ultimately die at the hands of the state.
The early Nazi years in Germany bred mistrust and suspicion between races, religions, and even between family members.
"We, all German children, were trained to spy on our parents," Lewy told the rapt students, "and report to the authorities anything our parents might say against the government."
Lewy then asked the Spaulding students how they might feel running a belt-whipping gauntlet of Hitler Youth every day after school, how they might feel if one of their playmates, a Gentile boy, suddenly could not longer play with you because a member of the Hitler Youth had reported the friendship, and the Gentile boy's parents were threatened to have their food rations withheld if they didn't forbid the friendship. Sadly, these things happened to Lewy, just a young boy moving up through graded school.
One Spaulding student clearly was imagining Lewy's circumstances. She asked why Lewy and the other orphan children didn't establish secret routes from the school to the orphanage to avoid the Hitler Youth. Lewy replied that someone would inevitably report the Jewish students movements, and the Hitler Youth would find them.
It continued. Anti-Semitic graffiti was painted on Jewish establishments. Nazi monitors sat in the back row of every synagogue, listening for any words spoken against the government. Business steadily declined at Jewish establishments.
On the bright side, Lewy's father remarried, this time to a Jewish woman. But shortly thereafter, Arthur was arrested again, on the very night of Stephan's Bar Mitzvah, and before long, Lewy's father had to sell his business at a loss and began working illegally at night.
Then came Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass," Nov. 9, 1938. It was an orgy of anti-Semitism throughout Germany: Hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned shops destroyed or their windows smashed, tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and nearly 100 Jews killed. At Lewy's orphanage, some adult staff were taken away and all 100 children were locked in their synagogue. It was not torched, Lewy thinks because it adjoined two apartment buildings. But a gas line broken in the riot of vandalism threatened the lives of all the trapped children. Fortunately, one of the boys finally smashed one of the synagogue's beautiful stained glass windows to allow fresh air inside. It was one of a series of close calls for the young man.
"When we were released from the synagogue, we went out and we saw all our religious articles laying on the street—people were kicking them along," said Lewy. "It was," he sighed, "a very difficult thing to see, among many difficult things to see."
Rather than settling into a comfortable nest with his new wife, Lewy's father was soon forced to walk the streets in the wee hours of the morning to avoid the nighttime spot searches of Jewish homes regularly carried out by German police.
"My parents set up a signal system," said Lewy. "My mother, if the police were looking for my father, would put a bird cage in the window of the apartment and my father would look, and if he saw it, he would keep walking."
Lewy told the Spaulding students that he harbors a deep, involuntary distrust of police even to this day as a result of the persecution of Jews by the German police he suffered under and observed through much of his childhood. Lewy said his regular beatings by Hitler Youth as a child left him always expecting another attack, and to this day he said he carries his set of car keys clenched in one hand, with the sharp point of one key always jutting out from his fist, ready to get in a quick jab on an attacker and possibly gain a second or two to escape.
Lewy also said he still has nightmares about being chased by Hitler Youth, German police, or Nazi soldiers, and his wife has to reassure him, when he wakes up in a sweat, that he is now safe.
One of the most emotionally traumatic moments he recounted came when his parents suddenly told him, at age 13, they were going to send him out of Germany to protect him, and that they might follow him when able – if ever.
"I want you to imagine at breakfast one day getting the news that your parents were sending you to a foreign country and you may never see them again," said Lewy. "Many of you are not far from the age that I was at that time."
The young Lewy, along with 40 other German children, was sent to an orphanage in a castle outside Paris in 1939. Later that year, WWII erupted when Germany invaded Poland and France and England declared war on Germany. Lewy lost contact with his parents for three years.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, the 40 German children in the orphanage were forced to flee by hiding on a river barge, sitting below-decks in a coal bin. Their barge encountered a German boat and was searched. The children were discovered.
"We do not know why we weren't all shot," said Lewy. The children were returned to their castle, now occupied by Germans, and allowed to live in the basement as long as they performed menial chores for the occupiers.
Later in 1940, the Quakers arranged a transfer of the Jewish orphans at Quincy to another French orphanage outside Limoges, in unoccupied France, where the children would be properly cared for, and even taught trades. Lewy asked the International Red Cross there to try to find his parents, and, to his amazement, they located his parents in America.
They had managed to get a visa to travel to Holland, and then left Holland by ship for America just three days before Holland fell to the Germans. A relative in America had agreed to sponsor the Lewys, and they ended up in Haverhill, Mass.
Lewy's parents began to try to obtain a visa for their now-teenaged son but failed, and in desperation, his mother wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, pleading his case and pledging that he would make a fierce American solder against the Nazis. For whatever reason, Lewy's visa was then approved, and in less than two months, he was on a ship for America. En route, the ship was stopped by a German submarine, boarded, then allowed to continue.
"We expected the torpedoes (from the submarine), but they never came," said Lewy.
On June 25, 1942, Lewy arrived in Brooklyn to meet his parents and soon thereafter joined the U.S. Army. Lewy's unit saw action in the famous Battle of the Bulge in France, eventually repelling the Nazi's final counterattack, and the unit was slated to head for the war in the Pacific, but the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan ended the war against Japan before Lewy's unit even crossed the Atlantic.
Lewy followed the path of many post-War G.I.'s, finishing his high school education, and obtaining a college degree by attending classes as night. He became an accountant, married, has two children and retired at age 66.
"Frequently, I speak in schools and to other groups, telling my story," said Lewy. "I am often asked why I do this, why I would willingly bring back unpleasant memories. Firstly, my generation is getting older — there are fewer and fewer survivors to tell their stories. Secondly, our stories show what can happen when people do not act. Perhaps if enough people hear our story, history will not repeat itself."
A Spaulding student asked Lewy if, as a child, he saw any Germans speak out against the Nazis.
"Not really," said Lewy, although he suspects his own father may have spoken against the Nazis with other Jews in private. "Sometimes he would send me to a back room of our apartment when he wanted to speak with guests, I think so I would not hear things that I might later be asked about by the police, so I would tell the truth when I would tell them I had heard nothing."
Lewy said it remains important to resist hatred and discrimination everywhere, and he showed photos of recent neo-Nazi graffiti in the United States — bright red swastikas on New Hampshire high school bathroom stalls and on the outside of tipi-style tents at a Massachusetts youth camp.
"The most important message I can give to you," said Lewy to the Spaulding students, "Is to have respect for each other … if you have issues with another group of students, whether religion, or cultural practices, talk about with them, but don't hate them."
As the Spaulding students filed out of the library where they had gathered to hear Lewy, three students merged in the hallway. One student shook her head and said, "It's so sad … no, not even sad, it's so frustrating."
Another student in the hallway who hadn't heard Lewy's presentation asked what she was so disturbed by, and a third student explained she had just heard a speaker talk about the Holocaust.
"Oh, that's when a bunch of Jews were killed," said the student that hadn't heard the talk. Another student turned to him, clearly exasperated with his flippant remark: "Now, see, that kind of statement is exactly what that guy (Lewy) was talking about!"
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