THE “untypical” story of a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust after being cared for by a Dutch woman from a Catholic family was told during a commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day, at Lambeth Palace, on Monday.
Dr Martin Stern, who survived camps at each Westerbork, within the Netherlands, and Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, was born in 1938, within the Netherlands, and arrested in 1944 at a small school in Amsterdam. At the time, he was being taken care of by a Dutch couple who pretended he was their very own son.
Dr Stern’s father had been hidden by a Dutch family who were “devoutly religious Protestants” running a tiny farm where that they had hidden, at anybody time, 70 people. They were raided 3 times; the farmer and his son and Dr Stern’s father were all sent to concentration camps where they died.
Dr Stern and his sister (who was arrested on the age of 1) were cared for at Theresienstadt, in women’s dormitories, by a girl prisoner from a Roman Catholic background who had married a Jewish man. When a train was loaded with children, destined for Auschwitz, this woman decided to go along with them. But their names were never called, perhaps because that they had never been in the youngsters’s dormitory. “She had, in that and other ways, saved our lives.”
His story was “necessarily untypical for a Jew caught up within the Holocaust”, he said. But it was “by telling stories that we hope to make schoolkids need to know more”.
The commemoration marked 80 years because the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. A survivor of the camp, Jean Améry, was quoted by the potter and writer Edmund de Waal: “I wouldn’t have clarity today, and I hope I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case which may then be placed within the files of history. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is settled. No memory has develop into mere memory.”
LAMBETH PALACEThe Archbishop of York
Mr de Waal is the son of the Very Revd Victor de Waal, a former Dean of Canterbury, who arrived in England from Vienna in 1939. His father had never told him what had happened, and it had taken him many years to trace the story, which he told in a memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes (Books, 29 June 2011). His father’s grandmother had taken her own life, not believing that they’d escape. His aunt, uncle, and cousins, had all died in concentration camps.
Six candles, representing the six million Jews who died within the Holocaust, were lit in a vessel created by Mr de Waal, who explained that, in each his stories and pottery, he sought to point out “where damage has occurred”.
Testimony was also provided by Daniela Abraham, a second-generation survivor of the Roma genocide and founding father of the Sinti Roma Holocaust Memorial Trust. She was raised by her great-grandparents until she was 16. Her great-grandmother was raped by Nazis once they arrived at her home town in Slovakia. Her eight siblings had all died. Her great-grandfather had managed to flee on foot from deportation in a boxcar.
Roma were the “most discriminated against group in Europe”, she said, referring to the genocide of Roma through the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties, through which about 30,000 were killed and half one million displaced, and the forced sterilisation of Roma women that had continued “well into the twenty first century”. It was difficult to find out the variety of Roma killed through the Holocaust, but recent work suggested that it may very well be within the region of 1.5 million people.
LAMBETH PALACEDr Martin Stern
During the service, scripture and prayer was chanted, sung, and skim in each Hebrew and English.
The Senior Rabbi of the New North London Masorti Synagogue, Jonathan Wittenberg, told the gathering: “In a post-truth, post-fact, and post-empiricist world, where it’s felt ‘my narrative is nearly as good as yours,’ the door is open to how the story gets told, and due to this fact it’s most significant that we testify to the reality: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek. These places were; these items happened.” The gathering was present to “bear witness with gratitude and admiration to those that survived and those that had the courage to assist them”.
Liberation, nevertheless, was a “dangerous and limited word,” he said. “It suggests that one is now free from what happened. The world and life don’t know closure. . . I would like to honour those that struggle with the past, whose life has been difficult and lonely and torment”.
After welcoming guests to the chapel, the Archbishop of York, said: “I do know that it’s, and has been, the distortions of Christian theology over lots of of years that always appeared to legitimise the persecution of discrimination of Jewish people, promoting and fostering terrible negative stereotypes, and this, too, we must learn from, and particularly today when there may be such a rise in anti-Semitism and race hate.”
He pledged to work “ever more closely together, rejecting the misuse of Christian doctrine and remembering that Jesus himself, a Jew, steeped in and learning from the Jewish tradition, taught all those that followed him to like their neighbour as themselves”.
The closing words were provided by the CEO of Liberal Judaism, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, who drew on a reading of Psalm 23 with its images of still waters and green pastures, “not images of escape or avoidance; they’re images of deep restoration, of renewal”. The audience gathered was remembering “the resilience and hope that emerged from the darkest of times”.
