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Guy Stern, Holocaust refugee who interrogated Nazi POWs, dies at 101
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Guy Stern’s father grasped the danger that awaited Jewish families like theirs and offered his son an admonition. “You have to be like invisible ink,” he said. “You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, the invisible ink will become visible again.”
Dr. Stern was 15 when his parents sent him by himself to live with an uncle in the United States. They hoped to join him, and to bring their two younger children. But the “golden door was not wide open,” Dr. Stern later said, describing the reception that awaited many refugees during World War II.
In the end, his family remained trapped in Germany, and Dr. Stern alone among them survived the Holocaust. He was 101 when he died on Dec. 7 at a hospital in West Bloomfield, Mich.
He never forgot his father’s words about invisible ink. They were a warning, but also a promise — that “better times” would come, and that when they did, Dr. Stern would leave a mark.
He did, first as one of the “Ritchie Boys” recruited to a secret U.S. military intelligence program that helped defeat Nazi Germany, and later, after the war, as a professor of German literature and culture, his attention ever tuned to the stories of exiles and immigrants.
In recent decades, Dr. Stern drew the interest of historians, documentarians, students and scholars seeking to learn and preserve the history of the Holocaust.
He appeared in the 2004 film “The Ritchie Boys,” a documentary about the men — and women — so named for their training at Camp Ritchie, Md. Of the 20,000 soldiers in their ranks, several thousand were Jewish refugees of Nazi Europe whose linguistic skills proved vital to U.S. interrogation and intelligence-gathering during the war.
Dr. Stern also was featured prominently in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the three-part documentary directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein that aired last year on PBS.
“We were at the tail end of the window of time,” Novick said in an interview, “when it would be possible to find people who remembered this history from living it.”
Günther Stern was born on Jan. 14, 1922, in Hildesheim, in northern Germany. His father was a traveling textile salesman, and his mother assisted him in his work while raising Dr. Stern, his brother and his sister.
Dr. Stern turned 11 two weeks before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. As the Nazi regime intensified its campaign of antisemitic persecution, his father lost much of his business, and Jewish students at Dr. Stern’s school were bullied and attacked.
His parents resolved to leave Germany and decided that, as the oldest child, Dr. Stern would go first. With help from a Jewish aid group in the United States and an uncle in St. Louis, the family managed to arrange for him — but only him — to sail to America in 1937.
Dr. Stern tried to raise the funds to bring his parents and siblings to the United States, but the bureaucratic morass proved impenetrable. The last letter he received from them, in 1942, informed him that they had been deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. He never learned if they died there or in a Nazi death camp.
Dr. Stern completed high school in St. Louis and was drafted into the Army in 1943. He was chosen for the military intelligence school at Camp Ritchie because of his fluency in German.
Link.
Guy Stern, Holocaust refugee who interrogated Nazi POWs, dies at 101 (msn.com)
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