{"id":171630,"date":"2024-05-08T11:49:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-08T11:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=171630"},"modified":"2024-05-08T19:34:21","modified_gmt":"2024-05-08T19:34:21","slug":"holocaust-survivor-speaks-at-navsup-business-systems-center-days-of-remembrance-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=171630","title":{"rendered":"Holocaust Survivor Speaks at NAVSUP Business Systems Center Days of Remembrance Event"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stern was born in Nuremberg, Germany in March 1936. From 1941 to 1945, his family lived in various holding, work, and concentration camps throughout Europe and Russia during World War II. Once his family was liberated, they remained in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1947.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name is Peter Guenter Stern. My brother’s name is Samuel and I’m going to spend a little time talking about why the difference in names,\u201d said Stern.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1935 in Nuremberg, laws were passed laws that restricted the life of Jews. Restricted in the sense that doctors could no longer practice in a hospital, lawyers could not practice in court, teachers were fired from the public school systems. You could no longer run a business. The ability for Jews to function as citizens, and\u00a0members of the community was taken away. These were called the Nuremberg Laws,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of those laws was that all Jewish children would be born and given a name that was out of the first book of the Bible. So, if you were a girl, you could have the name of Sarah, Esther, and\u00a0Ruth. Boys could be Abraham, Moses, Israel, or Samuel,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that’s what my parents named my brother,\u00a0who was\u00a0born in 1939.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat law was passed in 1935. I was born in 1936 and yet my name is still what it is,\u201d he said. \u201cThe\u00a0thing was, the\u00a0Germans were wise enough to know that this was a real bad publicity thing, so they waited till after the Summer Olympics of 1936 to start enforcement of that law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stern\u2019s father, Artur, was an auto mechanic and shop owner but had to get rid of his business, so he started to work in a Jewish school, teaching young boys general shop and auto mechanic skills.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all lived in the same house, and this was a Jew house,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat Nuremberg did was to get all the Jews who remained in Nuremberg to live in specific houses. It wasn’t a ghetto. It wasn’t a fenced-in area and the houses were scattered throughout the city,\u201d said Stern as he shared and reflected on a photograph from a child\u2019s birthday party.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know whose birthday it was, but I’m the guy with the dark suspenders holding onto the tricycle. The next picture shows my father with some of those students,\u201d he said. \u201cThe hope was that they would have the makings of a trade, so when they got to whatever country they were going to, they would have the ability to make a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father was teaching in that school, but come November 1941, an order was issued saying that 1,000 Jews would come out of the area of southern Germany, and they would be shipped to Riga [Latvia],\u201d said Stern.<\/p>\n

Of those 1,000 Jews, 520 came from Nuremberg, and Stern\u2019s family was deported from Germany to a holding camp in Latvia.<\/p>\n

In 1942 they were transferred to the Riga ghetto. Stern noted that the ghetto was a crowded place but was less crowded as the Germans took thousands of people out, walked them into the woods, and executed them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concentration camps were designed for killing. People were killed in every concentration camp, I am sure. And there was a pretense for quite a while, hidden by the Germans that some of them were camps that\u00a0we’ll\u00a0work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In 1943 Stern\u2019s family was transferred to a work camp in Russia. One day his father saved a German officer\u2019s life during a Russian attack, and the officer sent his family to a Riga prison to be hidden, instead of returning to the ghetto. In January 1944 they were deported back to Germany. His father was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died. Peter, Samuel, and his mother were transferred to Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps\u00a0until they were liberated in April 1945.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to say how bad Bergen-Belsen was because, by the time that the British came, they’d had stopped feeding [us]. They had stopped burying people, and one of the first things they had to do was dig mass graves, they buried about 20,000 corpses, which the German guards had to put onto trucks, then take and put into the graves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stench was horrible. The stench of all the camps was very noticeable. You could not have been near a camp and not known that something was going on that had no validity whatsoever,\u201d said Stern.<\/p>\n

Stern noted that at the end of the war, there were 17 survivors from the 520 shipped out from Nuremberg, which included his mother, brother, and himself.<\/p>\n

Each year, the Navy honors the victims and survivors of the genocide that killed more than six million Jewish people and millions of others during the week that runs from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day through the following Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnderstanding these lessons from the past and taking responsibility for our future is the key to treating each other with dignity, courtesy, and respect, regardless of our religion,\u201d said Capt. David\u00a0D. Carnal, commanding officer, NAVSUP BSC.<\/p>\n

Bryant Esendencia, chairman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee at NAVSUP BSC moderated the event.<\/p>\n

\u201cListening to a person who wants to share their personal experiences helps us better understand their world and how it fits with ours,\u201d said Esendencia. \u201cWith that knowledge, we can all be more empathetic in the people that come across our life. It\u2019s those collective experiences that contributes to our success in protecting our country and allies.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year, the Navy observes Holocaust Days of Remembrance from May 5-12, with Holocaust Remembrance Day occurring on May 6. This year’s observance theme, \u201cBehind Every Name A Story: The Courageous,\u201d is in honor of the late Adolfo Kaminsky, whose forged identification papers are estimated to have saved 10,000-14,000 Jewish people from concentration camps.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the number of people that directly survived the Holocaust is dwindling, their legacy continues in the form of their stories, which we must never forget,\u201d said Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro in a message to all Department of the Navy personnel on April 30.<\/p>\n

For more information about the Holocaust and scheduled events to remember survivors and victims, visit the National Archives at https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at https:\/\/www.ushmm.org\/, or https:\/\/www.defenseculture.mil\/Special-Observances\/#days-of-remembrance-holocaust-remembrance-day.<\/p>\n

For more information about NAVSUP BSC visit, https:\/\/www.navsup.navy.mil\/NAVSUP-Enterprise\/NAVSUP-Business-Systems-Center\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stern was born in Nuremberg, Germany in March 1936. From 1941 to 1945, his family lived in various holding, work, and concentration camps throughout Europe and Russia during World War II. Once his family was liberated, they remained in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1947. \u201cMy name is Peter Guenter Stern. My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":171632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171633,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171630\/revisions\/171633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/171632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}