Klaus Stern
Nearly fossilized old Jew Klaus Stern is a seasoned veteran on the Holo speaking circuit, speaking all over the NorthWest -- including Washington via the Speaker's Bureau of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.
Stern had been selected for execution for his bad health.
But a miracle!
On the morning his tattoo number was called for work duty, Stern’s face had become bloated by malnutrition, fooling a guard with its "grotesque illusion of health" and his life was saved.
Stern recalled the guard saying, “Hey you with your big fat face, don’t you know what it means to be in that (work) group?’”
Holocaust survivor tells students about horrors of Auschwitz
By SKIP DUSSEAU
The Daily Inter Lake
But for the luck of the draw, Klaus Stern might have become a Montanan years ago instead of a survivor of the Nazi death camps of World War II.
In 1938, amid the shuttered and shattered Jewish neighborhoods in Berlin, Stern's mother and father pleaded in vain with the U.S. Embassy for one of the few family visas available to Jews. In those days, Butte was a bustling mining town, and Stern's mother had just returned from visiting relatives who owned a jewelry store there. She knew time was running out for German Jews, and she grasped desperately at the last chance to take her family to the safety of the Rocky Mountains.
Within a few years, six million Jews, including 35 members of Stern's family, his mother and father, aunts and uncles and cousins, were dead, their bodies burned or buried in one of the most notorious pogroms in human history.
Stern and his new wife, Paula, were arrested for "treason" in 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, "the man at the podium," a Nazi judge who decided life or death, spared the Sterns, who were still healthy from years of labor on a farm. The two were separated and would not see each other for 28 horrible months.
Only their pledge to each other, their belief in God, and their anger, kept Klaus and Paula alive. Fifty-six years later they still work together to keep the memory alive for others.
Stern is in Montana this week, where his mother had hoped for asylum, to talk to young people so that they might never forget. He gave a gripping account of his ordeal to a hushed audience of students at Flathead High School on Wednesday.
Visibly moved by Stern's account, student body President Trusten Williamson said, "We kids are going to be running the world someday, and we must never let this (the Holocaust) happen again." Stern travels and speaks extensively as part of his and his wife's "mission" to prevent the horror from happening again. At the high school, Stern recounted first hand the stories of how Hitler fanned the flames of anti-Semitism in a perverse attempt to unite pure "Aryans," under his yoke.
Krystallnacht, in November 1938, the night the Berlin skies were reddened by the bonfire of Jewish businesses and homes, was the beginning of the Holocaust, said Stern. Forced to wear the yellow star and turned into slaves to work on Nazi farms, Stern and his family were torn apart for one reason: They worshiped the God of Abraham.
"My family was German for many generations, and my father won the Iron Cross for Germany in World War I, but it didn't matter," Stern intoned with a rare edge of bitterness. Stern says there is an ominous similarity to 1930s Germany any time a group uses hate to gain power.
One student in the audience asked Stern if he knew about the 'green Nazi' controversy currently at play in the Flathead. KGEZ radio host John Stokes uses the term to describe environmentalists. "I think it's disgusting to use the word Nazi to describe decent men and women. Those who use it (the word Nazi) should go back and educate themselves on what that really means." Stern said, "That man (Stokes) should use his energy and influence to bring positive ideas for business here. It's bad for business when tourists hear that kind of thing going on."
Stern said differences of opinion such as over the proper level of environmental protection should be worked out through "dialog and mutual respect."
In the wan auditorium light it was difficult to make out the tiny row of numbers tattooed on Stern's arm, but up close they offered a living exhibit of the cruelty he had endured.
Pictures of the newly wed Sterns in 1942, faces robust with health and good cheer, flickered on the auditorium screen in a 15-minute video presentation that gave witness to Stern's story. A picture taken of the reunited couple three years later showed faces smiling with gratitude for their survival of the Holocaust, but etched with horror and aged in a way only terror can. Stern spoke calmly of his narrow escape from death. Unaware that only days remained until the American liberation, Stern, his body wasted from 165 pounds to a gaunt 95, had stumbled in front of the Nazi doctor for the regular "selection" for the gas chamber, and after two years of heroic struggle, Stern lost the roll of the dice.
Minutes from a gruesome death - asphyxiation by the pesticide Cyclon B - fate intervened, and Stern was pulled out of line at the last minute. "One of the guards saw my face swollen (with edema) and thought I was too healthy to die," Stern said. A few days later, the gates to the camps were flung open, and the rebuilding of lives began. The American saviors wept when they saw the emaciated survivors. "Many people could not keep themselves from eating too much, and they died within days," said Stern, who was shipped to a rest camp in Bavaria for a two-month recuperation. Stern said the experience in the Nazi death camps crushed some, but left him a better man.
"Today I don't have any animosities and I don't worry about much," said Stern. "Sometimes my wife asks me if I mind having leftovers for dinner, and I just laugh at her and remind her how it was." Stern says he doesn't hate the German people, but "I can forgive (the Nazis) only when the six million dead can forgive, and I don't think they can."
Article: "Holocaust survivor tells students about horrors of Auschwitz"
