A perfect antidote

A 95-year-old Holocaust survivor has a roommate — a granddaughter of Nazis

watch TV together.

They have dinner together almost every night, and snack on herring salad and crackers before their meal - a mutual favorite. They have long conversations about history and current events. Last semester, Mr. 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 Ms. Heitfeld, Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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,” Mr. Stern said. “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.”

Ms. Heitfeld grew up in a small town in northern Germany and, until she moved to the United States five years ago to work as an au pair, she’d never met a Jewish person, she said. On her way to dropping off the children she took care of at school, she’d pass a Jewish retirement home. With several hours in the morning to herself, she decided to volunteer there. It was one thing to be meeting Jewish people her own age, but she said she wanted to spend time with the generation directly affected by what her ancestors did.

“I’ve reflected so much about my own identity. If I want to identify with my country, it’s about confronting the things that hurt and put me in an uncomfortable position,” she said. “I feel responsibility for the memory of the Holocaust.”

The rise of anti-Semiticfueled acts in the United States - bomb threats at Jewish community centers and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries - has been weighing heavily on Mr. Stern and Ms. Heitfeld.

The vitriol directed at minority groups, not just Jews, is all too reminiscent. “I walk with a fresh injection of pain and hurt,” Mr. Stern said.

Ms. Heitfeld feels it, too. “I’ve been in more pain that I’m living with a man who went through this and now has to be confronted with this on the news,” she said.

At least 100 Jewish community centers and schools have reported threats since the beginning of the year, a menacing pattern that has upended daily life for people in 33 states and prompted a federal investigation that has come under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers, security specialists and Jewish leaders.

Combined with the recent vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia and Missouri, the calls have stoked fears that a virulent anti-Semitism has increasingly taken hold in the early days of the Trump administration.

For Mr. Stern, this is a moment that he cannot stay silent.

“I feel like it’s important for the reason I survived to tell the world, to tell the next generation what to look out for to have a better, secure, free life,” he said. “It’s important for them to learn how to behave with other people, with other nations, religions. We’re different, but we’re all human and there is room for each and every one of us in this world. It should be in harmony instead of hatred, racism. . . . We are all born; we’re all going to go. While we’re here, we should try to improve the world.”