Stories of Survival

Announcer: Funding for this program provided by The Abe & Ida Cooper Foundation in commemoration of Fred Cooper.

Additional funding by Randee and Rob Romanoff.

[music] My real name is not George Muellar.

It's George Levy, a Jewish name.

For 45 years, I hid the fact that I was Jewish.

Even my kids didn't know anything about what I'm going to tell you now.

[music] One of the most moving experiences I ever had was going back some 65 years later.

There were 15,000 children under the age of 15 who passed through Terezn between 1942 and 1945.

Less than 10 percent survived.

I was one of them.

Narrator: While many Holocaust accounts focus on Auschwitz located in Nazi-occupied Poland, the Nazi's created tens of thousands of concentration camps across occupied Europe.

These are two stories of survival from Germany and Denmark.

I was only five years old.

I'll never forget it.

Suddenly, there was noise on the streets.

There were planes in the air.

It was totally unexpected.

Narrator: The German Army occupied Denmark in just six hours.

One of the shortest military campaigns of World War II.

But unlike other occupied countries, Denmark's government stayed in power and protected their Jewish population.

We were probably the only occupied country in Europe where conditions of the first three and a half years were relatively normal.

My mother, father, and I didn't have to wear the Star of David.

I was able to go to public school.

My father was able to continue to practice law.

And we could still take vacations.

I was born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1930 and grew up under Hitler's rise to power.

But I didn't notice any problems until the time I was eight years old.

People started posting signs on the streets, on the walls all about Jews and how bad they were.

I still remember words to the songs: "We will be happy when the Jewish blood flows off our knives," things like that.

And my mother had problems.

She was invited by one of her best friends, Mrs. Bernick, to her house.

And the next day it was shown in Der Der Strmer, it was a Nazi newspaper, that Mrs. Bernick, they had invited the Jews Levy, Lucie Levy, and so, naturally, Mrs. Bernick and her husband would never invite her again because they were afraid.

Even my teacher used to say bad things about Jews.

My non-Jewish uncle, Joseph, was alarmed by these changes and moved to the U.S. to protect his Jewish wife, my mother's sister.

He also advised my father to leave Germany, but my parents believed all this was going to blow over.

[chatting] Narrator: On November 9, 1938, Nazi mobs took to the streets in Germany.

They looted and burned Jewish synagogues, businesses, cemeteries, and homes.

Thirty-thousand Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned.

It would become known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.

When I woke up the next morning, I knew there was something wrong.

My mother said they had taken my father and his brother to a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen.

Of course, we didn't know what a concentration camp was.

Six weeks later, I was standing right there and there was a long line of people and there was my father, he was on the stretcher, sores all over his body and both his legs were frozen.

In his release paperwork, they called my father, not Mr. Max Levy, but Jew Max Levy.

And then he died just after New Year's in 1939.

And so, then my mother decided to leave Germany.

She had a friend and he was going to help her to get out of Germany with her two kids, but he was not able to get my mother out of Germany, evidently.

But he was able to get my sister and me out of Germany.

And when my mother took my sister and me to this train, my mother said, "Now you have to get on the train and take care of your sister."

So, then the train started to move and she said, "I'll come to Holland soon and we'll be a family," and then she waved.

Well, that was the last time I saw my mother.

[music] Narrator: While George and his sister boarded the train to the Netherlands, the political situation for Steen and his family in Denmark was changing.

In August 1943, under pressure from the Nazis, the Danish Government resigned and a Nazi plan to deport all Jews was set for early October.

But Upstanders in the Danish resistance responded by smuggling more than 7,000 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden.

Less than 500 Jews remained to be deported.

Steen and his family among them.

Life came to a sudden halt the fateful morning of October 2, 1943.

Two Gestapo officers pounded on our door early in the morning on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

The Germans picked this day on purpose because they knew people would be home celebrating the holiday.

Unfortunately, living in the middle of the country, we had not been warned about the deportation.

My father answered the door.

I was eight years old.

I couldn't understand why they came to our apartment.

We got only 45 minutes to get ready before being loaded into a cattle car.

It was very, very dark.

There was nothing to eat or drink.

It was filthy and crowded.

We had to use buckets in a corner as toilets.

I was frightened and I think all the adults were frightened too.

We had no idea where we were going or what was going to happen to us.

Narrator: While events unfolded in Denmark, George and his sister had arrived in the Netherlands.

My uncle, Joseph, in Chicago had arranged to get us a guardian, Mr. Joseph Van Mackelenbergh.

If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be sitting here.

He took us to live in a Catholic convent that was part of the Dutch underground.

May 10th, the Germans invaded the Netherlands.

A whole lot of them came.

A lot of things going on.

Germans marching through the town with bands and all those kinds of things.

It took only five days for the Netherlands to capitulate.

Things that had happened in Germany started occurring in the Netherlands.

The nuns and the priests there, they would talk about what happened.

They would tell me, Jewish people, and especially in the cities, they couldn't go to the stores at certain times.

If you were a teacher, you couldn't be a teacher.

No Jew could work for a Government.

The big thing that happened that bothered me was that they came out with a law that all Jews had to wear the star saying, "Jew."

I was afraid of what might happen to me and my sister.

On April 1943, one morning, we all went outside.

A car came with two policemen and said he would have to send me and my sister to a concentration camp.

I started crying because I remember what happened to my father and my uncle, Ludwig, and I was very upset.

And then we were going to the first camp called Vught.

This is the thing I always remembered that was my first impression: there was a man, an SS guy, and he jumped off his bicycle and he beat some prisoner, beat him with a stick, and he kept on beating him and beating him until he was on the ground and he was still beating him, and I was watching this.

So, we just stood there and then a woman came from the woman's camp and she says, "Come with me."

And so, we ended up then in the woman's camp in Vught.

While we were there, we also had a lady that's supposed to take care of us.

Her name was Flo.

And one day, she was put on a transport list and they were putting all those people on the trucks.

And she was yelling out that she can't go because she has to take care of the Levy kids.

There was an SS officer.

I remember his name is-- Ettlinger was his last name.

He yelled back at me, "Do you need her?"

But I didn't have much time, so I said, "No, I don't need her."

So, this has bothered me for years and years and years.

Narrator: While George and his sister endured in Vught, Steen and his family suffered three days and nights in horrible conditions.

Finally arriving in the Terezn concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

George: As soon as we arrived, they took all the jewelry, valuables, and money they had encouraged us to bring when we were arrested.

Then, we were separated into different barracks.

But because I was so young, somehow my mother was able to persuade the Nazis to let me stay with her.

My father, who used to be a lawyer and was used to office work, was now a slave laborer doing construction work in the street.

He was whipped, and they gave him so little food, that he lost 50 percent of his body weight and ended up in the infirmary.

He simply couldn't take the abuse and passed away at the very young age of 40, less than six months after we arrived.

We slept on thin straw mattresses full of fleas and lice.

It was very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.

We got very, very little food.

Usually, just bread and boiled water with some potato peel that they called potato soup.

I worked as a messenger transferring Nazi documents from one office to the other.

They were all in German and I couldn't understand the messages.

But there was a major upside: I would pass the kitchen with big sacks of raw potatoes just outside.

I would make sure there was nobody watching and help myself to a couple of potatoes to share with my mother.

So, what else does a 9-year-old boy do?

You play with children.

And I made some good friends from Czechoslovakia that I played with.

One day, they didn't show up.

I told my mother I was very sad and didn't know what happened to them.

And she told me she didn't know either.

I learned later in life, that my mother was really trying to shield her little boy from the horrible truth.

She knew exactly what happened to these boys.

They were likely some of the 90,000 prisoners from Terezn that were sent east to Auschwitz.

Narrator: While Steen and his mother endured in Terezn, George and his sister barely escaped certain death.

In June 1943, it was announced that prisoners ages 16 and under in Vught would be sent to a special children's camp.

The camp is the Sobibor killing center in occupied Poland where all 1,269 children are immediately murdered in the gas chambers.

[music] Only five children, as far as I know, were left in Vught, and I was one of them and my sister was one of them.

The reason we were saved was because Mr. Van Mackelenbergh convinced the camp commandant that we were only half Jewish.

Mr. Van Mackelenbergh, the Dutch underground, had prepared papers saying that my uncle in Chicago, who was an Aryan, was my real father.

And because my uncle was not Jewish, we were considered half Jewish.

Narrator: Not long after, George and his sister were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

They were placed in the Sternlager, or Star Camp, with other Jewish prisoners that SS officials hoped to exchange for Nazi prisoners held by the allies.

George: At first, we were treated better.

But after a while, the Bergen-Belsen became a regular concentration camp, so, the good treatment wasn't so much there anymore.

During the day, we stood in the cold with little clothing for hours and hours.

People would get beaten to death by guys while we were waiting.

Everybody had an extreme amount of lice.

And the Germans were afraid of lice because they cause a disease called Typhus which killed many people in the camp.

They would take all these naked men and they'd just throw them up on the wagon and there'd be like a big hay stack of dead bodies.

Narrator: Meanwhile in Terezn where Steen is being held, three Red Cross representatives are permitted to visit on June 23rd 1944.

The Nazi regime sees it as an opportunity.

They force the Jewish filmmaker and prisoner, Kurt Gerron, to make a propaganda film to fool the world about the living conditions faced by those imprisoned.

They promised Gerron he would live.

Steen: All of a sudden, it was purified.

The buildings were painted.

There were fake storefronts and fake banks.

If you went into the store, they had beautiful things, but there was no plumbing.

It was a big, big hoax.

They deported many of the elderly frail people so the visitors would see only relatively healthy prisoners.

We were even transferred into apartments for a few days.

The delegation didn't see a real concentration camp and they went back having no idea how we were really treated or how we lived, and the world didn't see it either.

As soon as "The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews" was finished, they deported Gerron to Auschwitz and gassed him the following month.

Narrator: Steen and his mother were in Terezn for 18 months, miraculously able to stay together the entire time.

In the spring of 1945, one month before the camp is liberated by the Soviets, all Scandinavian prisoners, including the Danes, were released from Terezn.

On April the 15th, we were liberated by the white buses sent by the Swedish Red Cross.

It was a dangerous journey through war-torn Europe, but we were finally free.

We heard about it a couple of days earlier but couldn't believe it until the buses actually arrived in neutral Sweden.

It was a miracle that they were able to rescue us.

But I really didn't feel like a free person because we were not in Denmark.

It was still occupied.

Then on May the 5th, my 10th birthday, the Germans surrendered.

And the Danes celebrated as never before.

A couple of weeks later, my mother and I were able to return to our home country, but it was bitter sweet.

The good news, we are back.

The bad news, we were there without my father.

Narrator: Within days of Steen's liberation from Terezn in April 1945, Nazi officials order the transfer of all Star Camp prisoners, including George and his sister, hoping to use them as collateral with the allies.

They are loaded into three trains heading from Bergen-Belsen to Terezn.

One train was liberated by Americans.

Another made it to its destination.

But the 3rd train was blocked by allied bombing along its route and disappeared as far as anyone knew at the time.

It is now known to historians as the "Lost Transport," and George and Ursula were its passengers.

We drove around Germany for 13 days.

At first, the train was shot at by the Americans.

Sometimes the train stopped in the countryside near a farm.

I know I could have escaped, but I don't think anybody did because everybody was sick and weak and couldn't hardly walk.

I got off the train to look for some food.

And so, I wanted to get back to the train because my sister Ursula was on the train.

So, I started running after it, but I couldn't run.

Every time I tried to run, my knees would cave in, and I'd fall.

But for some reason, I caught it.

Every time we went to a town, we would find out the next day the town was liberated by the Americans.

And so, I knew that if I just stayed on this train, it's going to happen any day.

It was early in the morning, and this woman yelled real loud, "We're free, we're free!"

And I looked out, and I saw Russian Army rounding up the guards, and after 13 days, the Russians liberated the train.

Narrator: For three months, George and Ursula were left to fend for themselves in the German countryside.

Eventually, they were put on another train to an American Army hospital in the Netherlands for treatment and recovery.

One day, the doctor came and he said, "Okay, you're ready to go now.

You're strong enough."

And they gave me some money and they said, "Go get your sister and you're now free to go wherever you want."

We decided then to go back to see Mr. Van Mackelenbergh.

He knew for a few months that they were alive but not where we were.

And so, we knocked on the door, and he said, "Who is it?"

And we said, "George and Ursula," and so, they opened the door, and they were glad to see us.

But we still had our concentration camp clothes on, and they had still all those lice eggs.

So, they burned our clothes right there in the garden.

And then we spent two years in Holland.

And in 1947 then, I came to this country and mostly lived in Chicago with our uncle Joseph.

My uncle was very good to us.

I got married, had children, and became a pharmacist with my own business.

My sister Ursula and I are only alive today because of the kindness of Mr. Van Mackelenbergh.

He could have done nothing, but he chose to be an Upstander in saving our lives.

The world needs more Mr. Van Mackelenberghs.

[music] Narrator: Steen stayed in the Denmark until the early 1950's.

His work eventually brought him to Canada where he met and married his wife, Eileen.

They moved to Chicago in 1962 and had children.

As a survivor, I want to make sure that nobody ever forgets that the Holocaust took place.

The late Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, says, "When you listen to a witness, you become a witness yourself."

You are now a witness.

[music] Announcer: Funding for this program provided by The Abe & Ida Cooper Foundation in commemoration of Fred Cooper.

Additional funding by Randee and Rob Romanoff.