Young woman and old ‘near normal’ man defeat Nazism

WHEN the Nazis ripped his family from their home in Poland, Ben Stern survived the ghettos and the concentration camps by never losing faith in human kindness.

So now, at the end of his life, the 95-year-old has found an almost perfect antidote to how he was treated by the Nazis: opening his home to one of their descendants.

His room-mate, Lea Heitfeld, is a 31-year-old German graduate student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, whose grandparents were active and unrepentant members of the Nazi Party. Rather than shy away from her family’s history, it has inspired her to learn about Jewish people and educate others about their religion and what they endured during the Holocaust.

Welcoming Heitfeld, the kin of the very people who forced him from his childhood home, to live as his room-mate while she finishes her degree feels like “an act of justice”, Stern said in an interview. “It was the right thing to do. I’m doing the opposite of what they did.”

There is much about their living situation that defies norms: the sizeable generation gap, the gender divide and, of course, the fact that they’re a Holocaust survivor and the granddaughter of Nazis. And yet they’ve both found they have so much to give each other.

Heitfeld provides companionship to Stern, whose wife of more than 70 years recently went into a nursing home because of her worsening dementia. In the evenings, the unlikely pair watch TV together. They have dinner together almost every night, and snack on herring salad and crackers before their meal – a mutual favourite.

They have long conversations about history and current events. Last semester, Stern, who never went to high school or college, audited a graduate class with her, and they walked together to campus every Thursday night.

For Heitfeld, Stern’s friendship is the rarest of gifts – an insight into human resiliency and compassion. “This act of his opening his home, I don’t know how to describe it, how forgiving or how big your heart must be to do that, and what that teaches me to be in the presence of someone who has been through that and is able to have me there and to love me,” she said. “That he was able to open the door for someone who would remind him of all his pain.”

Stern was a teenager when Nazis took over his small Polish town. He survived life in the Warsaw Ghetto, nine concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and the death march from Buchenwald. When Americans liberated them, he went searching for his family and found no one.

He met his wife, Helen, in a displaced prisoners’ camp after the war and the young couple made their way to America with nothing more than a dream for a new life. He had no education, no trade, no money and could not speak English. But he had his life.

“I was reborn. I did not forget what happened to me, but I was determined to rebuild the family that I lost and speak out on the pain and losses that so many people gave their lives for no reason – only because they were hated because of their particular religion. We found a mixture of religions being accepted and that was opening the door for a free life, that was a gift that until today I am thankful for the opportunity to enjoy the freedom to build the beautiful family that I have.”

His daughter, Charlene, has preserved her father’s story in a 28-minute documentary called the Near Normal Man, which is what he calls himself. No one could spend a day in Auschwitz and call themselves normal, he’d tell her. In the film, Stern recalls in his own words and with moving detail what he endured and how it shaped his world-view.

“When the Nazis came, his only weapon was his insistence upon living and remaining human,” Charlene Stern said. “I asked, ‘How did you change? How did you change after the Holocaust?’ He said, ‘Char, I became more compassionate.’ That’s the father I inherited.”

The rise of anti-Semitic-fuelled acts in the US – bomb threats at Jewish community centres and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries – has been weighing heavily on Stern and Heitfeld.

Living with a millennial. Making the film. It’s all in service to Stern’s lifelong mission to ensure people are informed to stand up to hate once there are no more survivors left to tell their stories. - The Washington Post