In the News
Henry Oertelt's Shoah memoir tells of survival and hope
By Stephanie Fox
Local author and lecturer Henry Oertelt vowed that he would never set foot again on German soil. However, Oertelt will return from Berlin, his birthplace, in time to speak 7:30p.m. Wednesday, Nov 8 at the St. Paul JCC's 2000 Jewish Book Fair.
Oertelt will read from his book, An Unbroken Chain: My Journey through the Nazi Holocaust (Lerner), which he wrote with his daughter, Stephanie Oertelt Samuels.
On the trip that he forswore ever making, Oertelt had plans to meet with the curator of Berlin's new Jewish Museum. He intended to donate to the museum some of the papers and documents he used to write An Unbroken Chain, which tells of how through luck and the help of good people, he survived the Holocaust.
"He put it down on paper because survivors are dying," said his daughter, "and those who are willing to speak are getting fewer and fewer. I think that he wrote, in part, to the family he lost. His mother died at Auschwitz, and his cousin, Stephanie, died there … He is writing for the families where no one survived."
In the prologue to the book, Oertelt also mentions that he was motivated to write An Unbroken Chain to "contradict the insane claims of deniers who say the Holocaust never happened."
"When I was a child he didn't talk about the Holocaust a lot," Stephanie Oertelt Samuels told the American Jewish World. "It was too painful for him. But, he met a woman – a teacher – who convinced him that it was his responsibility to pass on his story."
That was 30 years ago. Since then, Oertelt has been a popular lecturer at colleges and before civic and religious groups. Three years ago, at his family's urging and with the help of his daughter, he began to put down on paper the stories he had told to so many.
In the telling, Oertelt discovered that it was a series of chance happenings that were the difference between his living and dying. He is here today, he said, because of 18 links in a chain of survival.
His book begins with Hitler's rise to power and the depredations of Kristallnacht¥¥Nov. 9-10, 1938, the "Night of Broken Glass," when Nazi. SA men ransacked Jewish , homes, synagogues and shops, murdered 36 Jews, and transported some 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. Oertelt tells of his narrow escapes before, during, and after life in a succession of concentration camps, and his final liberation.
Oertelt estimates that 90 percent of the Jews in Berlin had been arrested and shipped off to camps before the Nazis caught up with his family in 1943. They were captured and transported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, but even that was a stroke of luck.
"To this day," Oertelt, writes, "I really do not know what; if anything 'qualified' us to be sent to this particular concentration camp. The rumor mill had established it as a camp - primarily for the so-called 'prominent' people.
Theresienstadt was a model camp, which Hitler used for display to concerned outsiders such as delegations from the Red Cross. It had a ersatz market building - erected for visiting delegations, then removed when they left - printed money (worthless), and choir of professional quality, in which Oertelt and his brother, Kurt, sang.
It was better than most camps, but it was still a place of death. From Nov. 1941 to May, 1945, of the 140,000 people sent to Theresienstadt, 33,000 died of starvation and diseases, and 87,000 ended up in dead camps.
From Theresienstadt, Oertelt and his brother were shipped first to Auschwitz, and later to Flossenbuerg. Then in April 1945, as Allied troops approached, Oertelt and other survivor's were ordered to leave the camp on a death march. After three day's of marching, as Oertelt was nearing the end of his strength, he heard a voice yelling, "Hey everyone, look over there!"
"Before me," he writes, "was the most incredible sight of my life. American armored vehicles were rolling down the hillsides. Out of their turrets, well over our, heads, their battle¥engaged machine guns kept on hacking away at the German front lines. During all that time, the vehicles' hatches were open, from which. Boxes of military K-rations were flung at us ....This really was the mount of my liberation."
After liberation by General Patton's Third Army and a return to Berlin, 0ertelt found a sponsor who would bring him to the United States. He ended up assigned, not to New York as he had hoped, but to St. Paul, where he has lived since.
"My father surviving makes me a survivor of the second generation," said Oertelt Samuels. "His surviving has allowed for me, for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It has given me a unique legacy in the world. It's made the committed to the creation of a world where people treat each other with dignity and kindness."
Stephanie Oertelt Samuels and Henry Oertelt