PAIR OVERCOME PAST
H’caust survivor’s pal a grandkid of Nazis
Nazi killers slaughtered Ben Stern’s parents and eight of his siblings, sent him to nine extermination camps and forced him on two death marches.
Today the 95-year-old Holocaust survivor lives in Berkeley, Calif., with an unlikely roommate — Lea Heitfeld, 31, a Jewish Studies major who grew up in Germany and whose grandparents were Nazis, the Times of Israel reports.
“A girl like that, a lady, should not have to pay the price for her grandparents,” Stern, whose arm displays a death-camp tattoo, told the newspaper.
The two met after Stern’s wife, also a Holocaust survivor, moved into an assisted-living facility.
His daughter, Charlene, concerned about him living alone, contacted a professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where Heitfeld (right, with Stern) studies.
“My professor wrote me that Ben is the ‘coolest, funniest, most handsome old dude I know,’ ” Heitfeld told the newspaper. The story of his wartime horror is told in a film written and directed by Charlene, called “Near Normal Man.’’ The odd couple, along with Charlene, were in- terviewed after a private screening at their apartment.
“I’m always so speechless,” said Heitfeld, who has seen the film several times. “Growing up in Germany, it was always facts and numbers. And getting to know this personal story, I feel like I understand more,’’ she said
Her grandparents, she said, were Nazis. But when Stern first asked about Heitfeld’s grandfather, she said only that he had been a “soldier.’’ But eventually, she told him the whole ugly story.
“My grandmother would say things like, ‘The war was the greatest time in my life because I was in the unit of the German girls,’ ’’ she said.
Heitfeld says her mom and dad distanced her from their parents, rejecting their bigotry, which they demonstrated by their nostalgia for the Nazi regime.
Stern (near left, as a young man) said he cannot understand how God could permit the Holocaust. “I’m going to have that question with me when I get to heaven and have court with God.”