Marlies gives back
THERE were times when Marie-Louise (Marlies) Green didn’t think she would make it to 25, never mind 100.
Her warm smile belies the hardships and horrors she witnessed having been born to a Jewish family in Essen, Germany on May 22, 1920, just 13 years before the Nazis came to power.
Her secret, she said, in the lead-up to her 100th birthday celebrations at St Andrew’s Retirement Living and Aged Care, Tallebudgera, was to “keep smiling, keep busy, keep laughing, enjoy everything in moderation … and lots of sleep”.
However, listening to Marlies speak in an oral history interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002, it is clear that an empathic heart and having inherited her parents’ strength have a lot to do with it as well.
She said she did not speak much about her experiences, but was recording her story then because “the world should know what happened”.
Farewell Germany
Marlies recalled an almost idyllic childhood, completely free of discrimination, despite being the only Jews in their area.
Only in early 1934, with the rise of Hitler, when her school, fearing closure, threw out all the Jewish students, Marlies said “that was really the first time I felt different”.
Faced with ever-increasing rules about where Jews could and could not go, and after her brother was bashed by a group of boys for being Jewish, her parents decided to leave Germany for rural Holland.
Holland is occupied
When Holland was then occupied by the Nazis from May 1940, shops and restaurants were closed to Jews, they were forced to wear yellow stars on all their clothes and travel restrictions began.
Dutch resistance was quickly snuffed out after some people attempted to boycott the new travel rules and the Nazis “picked out about 100 men and shot them” in punishment.
Living in the countryside, Marlies and her brother found work on farms, because farm workers were needed to feed the German army.
They were lucky to be given a reprieve thanks to a determined neighbour and the farmers insisting to German authorities that the siblings were essential for production.
Marlies still treasures that piece of paper, saying “This is my most precious document, which gives me the permission to leave the camp, and that is what has saved my life, just that little piece of paper”.
However, her parents were ordered to Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, and a month later the children were ordered to join them.
The family’s fate
Again, Marlies said she and her brother were blessed to find friends who, despite putting their own lives at risk, separately took them in and hid them for the rest of the war – 2½ years.
After the war, she learnt that her parents had died at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where at least 170,000 Jewish people were killed.
Marlies met her mathematician husband, Bert, who worked with Albert Einstein, in Edinburgh, married in Dublin and the pair moved to Australia for him to start a new department of mathematical physics at Adelaide University.
She has two children, Roy and Joanne, of whom she is very proud.
Joanne, who was able to be there for the 100th celebrations, said her mother always wanted to repay the help she received during the war, and “adopted” anyone new to Adelaide, ensuring they weren’t lonely.
To learn more about the Holocaust, go to www.ushmm.org