DV Journal

His father’s skills as an electrician and auto mechanic likely saved Peter Stern’s life during the Holocaust.

Stern discussed his experience as a German Jewish child who survived the Holocaust with the Anti-Defamation League Main Line Community Action Group on Tuesday.

“When we do a program, we tell students they are the last generation to meet a survivor,” said Lise Marlowe with the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center (HAMEC). “And once you meet a survivor, it’s your responsibility to tell their story. It’s also your responsibility to stand up and speak up to those Holocaust deniers that, sadly, they will meet in the world.”

She noted the Nazis killed 94 percent of the Jewish children in Europe because they couldn’t work as slaves. Before World War II, there were 1.6 million Jewish children in Europe, and the Nazis killed 1.5 million.

Stern, a Lower Merion resident, said his family lived in Nuremberg, Germany.

Stern, who was born in 1936, has a given name of Peter, but his brother, who was born three years later, is Samuel.

“The reason that I have an Aryan name and my brother does not is the Nuremberg Laws that were passed in 1935,” said Stern. These were laws passed to restrict Jews from various aspects of life, including practicing medicine or law. One law said that Jewish children “born in Germany had to have Jewish names.”

While the laws were passed in 1935, the Olympics were held in Berlin in 1936, and the Nazis “did not want that bad PR,” so they weren’t enforced until after the Olympics.

His dad, an electrician, owned an auto mechanic business, but because of the Nuremberg Laws, he had to sell it. Their family was forced to go live in a “Jew house” with four or five other families in an area near the train tracks. But his father found a job at a Jewish school teaching boys how to be mechanics.

In November 1941, Stern’s family was deported to Riga, Latvia. He was 6 years old.

“The term used was ‘resettlement,’” said Stern. “It was something the Jews in Germany believed was true. [But] it was a euphemism for murder.

“When we got there, that train, all the people were taken to a place called Jungfrenhof, which was the first concentration camp in Riga,” said Stern.

It was a former farm. It was snowy and cold. They marched to old stone barns with no heat or running water. Close to 4,000 people were in that camp. By the end of the war, only 149 survived.

But his family was sent to the Riga Ghetto shortly afterward.  In the forest outside Riga, the Nazis had marched 20,000 people into the woods and killed them to make room in the ghetto for more people. On a map, Stern showed sites of Nazi slaughters around Europe and concentration camps, “really killing camps.”

Then, his family went to an apartment building where German soldiers also lived. His father would take his students to fix German army vehicles. Others living in the house sorted the clothing of the people who were killed. After a few months, his family was sent to Russia, where his father and the mechanic students fixed German army vehicles. Stern and his brother played with German officers’ children.

At one point, his father was taken to fix vehicles closer to the front, where an attack took place. His father rescued the German commander and an officer, he said.

The Germans began retreating and took Stern’s family with them.

“We were sent to the Men’s Civil Prison in Riga. And for three months, we lived in one cell, on the second or third floor,” he said. In December 1943, they were put into a basement cell.

“This is the first time I truly remember my parents being scared,” he said.

The soldiers then took them back to Germany, riding in truckloads of clothing. They would hide underneath the clothing at checkpoints. In Berlin, they were brought before a judge who scolded his parents and sent his father to Buchenwald, where he died of typhus.

Stern, his mother, and his brother were interned in Ravensbruck, the only women’s concentration camp. There Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on some inmates. A gas chamber and crematorium were on the grounds.

As the Russian army approached, the Sterns were loaded on a cattle car to Bergen-Belsen, another concentration camp, where the conditions were even harsher.

“On April 15, 1945, we were rescued,” said Stern. He was 9 years old when his family was liberated. His mother had brothers in the U.S., and they were eventually able to emigrate. Stern studied metallurgy and became a science teacher in Connecticut, retiring after 30 years. Stern and his wife, Julie, have a grown son.

Stern didn’t talk about the Holocaust for many years, nor did his mother, who remarried. As an adult, he continued to take courses and one was on fascism. The professor assigned a paper on the Holocaust.

“I couldn’t do it. I approached him. He said, ‘Could you write about what you went through.’ And I did. I didn’t truly start talking [about the Holocaust] until after I wrote that in 1985…I started to speak and never stopped.”

About the recent increase of antisemitism in the U.S., he said, “In some ways, I’m scared sh**less, OK? But it isn’t just a question of antisemitism. It’s the ‘anti’ aspect and what kids will do. They will pick on weakness.”

“There’s a word we have that we should all start to believe in and use, and that word is empathy.”

Full disclosure: Like Whoopi, my mother’s maiden name was Goldberg. For all I know, we’re related.

I am saddened by the latest round of hate directed against Whoopi. I suppose if you’re putting yourself in the public eye, you should expect that every word you utter will be turned and turned again to detect even the slightest defect. Such scrutiny is even more reasonable when you are co-hosting a show in which sharing your view on contemporary issues is the focus.

Ms. Goldberg did not rise to fame for her political punditry. She did not pursue advanced degrees or engage in scholarly research. She’s funny. She’s an actress. I imagine such talents were front and center when she was invited to sit on a television set and opine about current events. Should we really expect nuance from a comedienne?

Last January, Whoopi spoke about the origins of the Holocaust being rooted not in race but in inhumanity. My credentials include advanced degrees and scholarly research. I spent years teaching university students about the Holocaust — entire semester courses where we discussed the roots, the process, and the consequences of the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the catastrophe that resulted in the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry, six million Jews, from 1940-1945. Whoopi was not wrong, and she is certainly not guilty of being an anti-Semite.

Anti-Judaism got the gussied-up name of anti-Semitism in 1879 by a German journalist who wanted to make Jew hatred sound less crass. Semites are not a race; Semitic languages, like Hebrew and Arabic, are spoken in North Africa and the Near East. By the Nazis’ definition, some of the most prominent Jew haters these days are Semites—Arabs. Does it make any sense at all to call some Semites anti-Semites? Modern scholars have discarded the hyphen in anti-Semitism to make the point that the term doesn’t mean what it was intended to convey.

When Whoopi said the Holocaust wasn’t about race, she was imprecise. For the Nazis, it was certainly about race. But, as Whoopi pointed out recently, why are we accepting the Nazis’ definitions and explanations? What, after all, is race?  For more than 30 years, scientists have been telling us race isn’t a scientific term. To use the jargon of social scientists, race is a “social construct.”

I remember this cover of Time Magazine (11/18/93) shining a light on the fuzzy borders of race. As I have come to learn, before World War II, Americans did not consider the Goldbergs, my mom’s family, to be White. After World War II, Americans had a change of view.  Or, at least, some did. That’s what Whoopi was talking about—perception.

Most Americans would ascribe whiteness to me.  I am of Ashkenazi descent—my grandparents were all born in Ukraine. Other American Jews, as well as roughly half of Israeli Jews, would not have whiteness ascribed to them, but they still would have been murdered by the Nazis and their legions of antisemitic sympathizers (including many Ukrainians). It may come as a surprise to Americans that by the early 1950s, the majority of Israelis had fled from countries in North Africa and the Middle East, spoke Arabic, and could fairly be described as Arab Jews.

One of the fascinating discoveries of the past decade was made by Sara Lipton.  In her book, “Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography,” she shows Jews were not depicted as looking any differently than their countrymen in medieval art until the 14th century. That’s why Jews had to wear identifying hats in earlier artistic depictions—so that Christians would know who was the Jew. The Spaniards, in their pursuit of “pure blood,” were instrumental in creating racial antisemitism by prohibiting descendants of Jews who had converted to Catholicism from holding political office. Given the anti-Hispanic sentiment among some Americans, it is ironic that the earliest racist legislation in Europe can be traced to 15th-century Spain.

There is no shortage of Jew haters. But to lump Whoopi Goldberg in that toxic mix is wrong headed and mean spirited. It’s also a distraction from those who truly are a threat to the Jewish community.

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