London based Holocaust Survivor two-day tour of Lancashire.
Holocaust survivor and educator Dr Martin Stern MBE came up from London on a two-day tour in Lancashire. The tour was facilitated by Rabbi Danny Bergson
He spoke at St Anne’s Hebrew Congregation, Preston City Council, Baines High School and St Mary’s Catholic High School, Blackpool (children aged 14-17).
Dr Martin Stern is a retired Clinical Immunologist who worked at the University Hospital of Leicester.
As a child he was transported with his one-year-old sister to the Westerbork prison camp in the Netherlands and then to the Theresienstadt Ghetto north of Prague.
Both survived due to the care of a woman prisoner who took them under her wing. His father died in Buchenwald concentration camp having passed through Auschwitz, his father’s brother died in Auschwitz and his grandfather also died in Nazi captivity.
The gentile man in Holland who hid him from the Nazis and looked after him (together with his wife) for 1½ years was discovered, arrested, interrogated and killed. Only his spectacles and a fake death certificate were returned to his wife.
Since retiring from medicine in 2002 Martin dedicates his time to Holocaust and genocide education working at The National Holocaust Museum in Laxton, Nottinghamshire, with the Holocaust Education Trust, and with the National Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Martin delivers his story with such vividness transporting his audience back in time to those dark and gloomy days in Europe. He is a master educator combining the drama of his own personal story within the broader context of Holocaust history in central Europe.
In one scene he describes how as a five-year-old child he was lined up against a wall at school ready for some exercise when two Dutch collaborators entered wearing ordinary raincoats. They were searching for Martin. The teacher calmly explained Martin was not in school that day but Martin, not understanding the gravity of the situation, instinctively put his hand up and said, “but Miss I am here”. He still remembers the ashen face of the teacher as he was led away by the men who rode him through the streets of Amsterdam on the back of a bicycle to a red brick building – a school that had been commandeered by the Nazis to use as a holding, interrogation and torture centre. It was here that he was interrogated and tricked into identifying the man who was hiding him.
The absurdity yet normality of how evil was perpetrated shot through his story.
He passionately emphasizes and exhorts his audience how the holocaust was not only about Jews. The Nazis murdered so many other categories defined as enemies. In fact, in many ways the holocaust tells us less about the Jewish people and more about the psychopathy and evil of its perpetrators.
Martin warns us of how vulnerable the underbelly of our western liberal democracies is and how if we open our eyes, we can see how our very liberal tolerant values can be exploited by those who seek to undermine our societies and way of life.
His message is one of eternal optimism in the human condition but coupled with a realism that ordinary humans are capable of extraordinary evil if hatred is left unchecked.
A man of letters having graduated from Oxford he is firmly opposed to the idea that man can decide and arbitrate on what is moral.
“I have a T-shirt,” he says. “On one side it says -to every complex problem there is a simple answer”. He pauses for effect concluding “and on the other side it says ‘and it is wrong! ‘”
Martin speaks with authority of how so many of the Nazi regime were great minds in science and other fields yet “see what they did with their minds!”
To Martin society must appeal to a transcendent power to find his moral conscience.
He quoted the famous author and Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”
Yet Martin following Jewish teachings is an eternal optimist in our ability to tackle hatred. However, for society to successfully meet this challenge education must be immersive from a very young age well before the mind ‘solidifies its attitudes’ making them so much harder to change or adapt. He cites this thinking as the motivating factor behind the pioneering work with primary school children at the National Holocaust Museum in Nottingham.
Martin and Rabbi Bergson made an ad hoc visit to see Blackpool resident Bettina Tyer – a fellow survivor of the Holocaust from Holland. Bettina, aged 98, marvelled “It’s one thing we both came from Holland but that we also were both hidden in Amsterdam the same town!!”. The two created an instant bond reminiscing in Dutch -their mother tongue. Rabbi Bergson noted how moving it was to see the awe and mutual love of two strangers whose shared fate brought them together 80 years after the Holocaust.
Rabbi Bergson commented “it was an utter privilege and honour to bring Dr Stern’s to speak to diverse audiences. The Fylde coast and Preston rarely have this opportunity to meet survivors, and we have reached a critical point where so few survivors remain alive and able to share their experiences to a younger generation. Martin is one of a select few who travels the country to areas that have never heard a survivor’s account before. All who hear Martin come away not only moved by his personal story of loss, resilience and recovery but also provoked to think deeply and challenge many of the assumptions we make about human nature and the capacity for evil. “
There are plans in the pipeline to bring back Martin later in the year. To register interest in hearing his story please contact dannyb@jewishmanchester.org. For more about Martin’s story visit https://hmd.org.uk/resource/martin-stern/.