by Guy Stern
Eli has convinced me that I have not completely fallen victim to the vicissitudes of old age and can at least cheer on my colleagues in their exploration of new paths and new pursuits for an organization that I, in my heart of hearts, also see as a commemoration of my own murdered family. One of those new initiatives resulted from a most positive development. Michigan’s State Legislature passed Public Act 170 of 2016 that made the study of the Holocaust mandatory for all eighth- through twelfth-grade public school students in Michigan. Our state is one of only ten states in the Union to mandate Holocaust education.
It was an occasion for celebration. As Michigan’s governor came to our campus to sign the bill into law, we held a large-scale celebration in which I enthusiastically participated. For me it marked the end of a long march. Many years before our founder, Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, had argued for just such an action. He finally was given a hearing before a governmental committee in Lansing, the state capital. He asked me to accompany him—and to lend my arguments to his. We did our best; but our efforts languished until several years after Rabbi Rosenzveig’s passing.
With passage of PA 170, HMC’s board resolved to make the Holocaust Memorial Center the nexus for Holocaust education in Michigan. As a result, HMC launched an ambitious plan of action: to train one thousand Michigan teachers in Holocaust content and pedagogy by 2020. To meet that goal, part-time director of education and member of the Governor’s Council on Genocide and Holocaust Education, Robin Axelrod, cultivated HMC’s team of educators and requested the appointment of a full-time department head. She aided CEO Mayerfeld in the national search for her successor, Ruth Bergman.
With Bergman at the helm, supported by Axelrod as senior education specialist, the Education Department’s leadership is solidly in place. Bergman’s vision is to “Blend the dissemination of accurate information with the instilling of ethical principles concerning the Holocaust and genocide. Pedagogically, never suppress the facts of the horror, but tailor them to the level of maturity of your students. Condemn actions of the perpetrators, but do not spare the indifference of ‘mere bystanders.’ And leave your audience with salutary role models: the heroic Christians and Jews who risked their lives and the safety of their families in extending their ‘daring and doing’ to help the persecuted.” Although not involved in the fulfilling of Bergman’s program, as the director of the Institute of the Righteous at HMC, I feel free to applaud her plan and the work of her team. I believe we are moving forward in the right direction at HMC!
The ambience of the museum embodies a close-knit family. The various individual fates that the museum brings to life through its displays bear many similarities to my family’s ethics—the unceasing hard work they engaged in to try to improve their situation, their belief in doing everything possible to secure the lives of their children, and to sustain that determination even to the end, as the Nazi cruelty dashed their hopes and extinguished their lives.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thoughts after Visiting France, 2016
At the beginning of this chronicle, I compared my life to a roller coaster. At its conclusion another analogy comes to mind: a carousel. So many situations from my childhood and my adulthood link to similar ones in the life of this old guy or old Guy.
During this last phase of my life, the three relatively short years of my experience as a Ritchie Boy have come to the forefront. I have been asked to give innumerable speeches, interviews, even film and TV appearances about those momentous wartime years. Yet the most reverberating echo came in May of 2016, when, for the first time in seventy-three years, I returned to the most dramatic episode in my life as a soldier, known to historians as the Invasion of Normandy. For reasons not entirely clear to me, for years I had declined invitations to come to Normandy, even those issued by well-meaning colleagues, such as Professor Helge-Ulrike Hyams, whom I had met at a scholarly conference in Laupheim, Germany. She owns a summer house in Sainte Marie du Mont, close to Foucarville, where I had first slipped into my role as an interrogator of German prisoners of war. So many fellow Ritchie Boys, who came ashore with me before or after D+3, had died in the meanwhile, and some, of course, had not lived beyond that fateful day in June of 1944. I thanked my colleague for the invitation and used an easy out when I declined it, simply saying that my schedule as a professor and administrator completely filled my calendar.
But I hadn’t been candid with her. While I was working on this manuscript, an editor pressed me into self-examination, arguing that my readers were entitled to know the reasons for my reluctance. I followed her advice and forced myself to think back on that day, June 6, 1944, when I had to steel myself from the horrors that I was exposed to on the beach. Against all my expectations, I was spared from being the squeamish person I had been all of my life. I have told in an earlier chapter that I was suddenly able to perform my duties on that day, no matter how horrific the experience was. Then, as a civilian, I returned to my hypersensitivity. I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with the memories evoked by returning to Normandy.
But now, in May of 2015, came an additional invitation. It was one that I, cast in the role of one of a small number of surviving witnesses, could not ignore without doing a disservice to my comrades-at-arms. Monsieur Gérard Viel, the cultural coordinator of the tiny town of Foucarville, with 250 inhabitants, was in the process of mounting an exhibit about the first POW enclosure, located on a huge meadow on the outskirts of the town. It had served as the first holding cage of our prisoners and would grow to be the largest enclosure on the Western Front, at one time holding more than sixty thousand prisoners. The cultural coordinator had ferreted out my whereabouts, after speaking with the aforementioned Professor Hyams, and he sent me an email. He explained his plans for a day commemorating the Invasion and the significance of Foucarville. Our mutual friend, Professor Hyams, had suggested me as an eyewitness who could give an account of his participation. The email was signed:
Gérard Viel
Consultant Culturel
Conseiller artistique
Communication culturelle
Management d’artiste
Régie générale
When I didn’t answer in good order, Monsieur Viel followed up with another email, this time in highly individualized English: “I hope we can exchange in the next weeks about this prisoner camp where you have work many year ago.”
Given that I was already toying with the idea of a European trip and was invited to a family affair in London, I tentatively agreed to accept Viel’s offer. Yes, I would think about giving the opening address at his exhibition, dealing with the camp in Foucarville and our activities there. But then a question crossed my mind. I called my French correspondent, telling him that I had written accounts of my Foucarville adventures both in German and English. Which one would he prefer? His response came out in bullet-fashion. “En francais, naturellement!” I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t given a speech in French in decades—and that was a very short one given at a conference at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.
But then I had all but committed myself to be present at Viel’s opening. I felt obligated. The translation of my English manuscript took the full weekend’s work of Maissa Saker, a French doctoral candidate at my university (with only occasional input by me). The results were greatly to the credit of my collaborator. Still, a month later, stage fright was my steady companion as I boarded the suboceanic railroad known as the “Eurostar,” which took me from London to Paris.
Professor Hyams met me at the train station in Paris; we continued by train to her house in Sainte Marie du Mont, passing locations that I suddenly perceived in dual perspective. Cities like Caen, Isigny, and Saint Mere Eglise flashed before my mind’s eye as I had first glimpsed them during that June of 1944. Now, a new reality of carefully tilled fields, flower gardens, and baby carriages superimposed themselves in a paean to peace upon my remembrances of bomb craters, devastated houses, and people just emerging from the oppression and depression of years of
tyranny.
My exploration of peacetime Normandy unfolded to be also an unexpected discovery. Shortly after we came ashore in 1944, we spotted a US paratrooper whose parachute was impaled on the spire of the village of Saint Mere Eglise’s most prominent church. Still alive, he was hanging there without a chance of rescue. A single shot by a murderous German would give him the coup de grace. We were sure he wouldn’t survive longer than a few hours. But against all odds, he made it. I was told during that reception, hosted by the village’s mayor, “When you Americans had retaken our village, he was cut loose, and was hospitalized, and we were told that he wasn’t seriously wounded. And we got living proof. He came to visit us after the war and we gave him a hero’s welcome.” The news cheered me for days.
This dual vision returned repeatedly during my three days on the Normandy coast. Nowhere else, with the possible exceptions of the British War Museum and the Eisenhower Memorial site in Abilene, Kansas, has this moment of world history been more faithfully preserved than in Normandy. Museums have sprouted, even in small fishing villages. And none of the German bunkers has been torn down. I walked with local citizens through a mile-square bunker, which had housed the so-called Nazi defenders of the “impregnable” Fortress Europe. Powerful memories of my comrades-in-arms, especially my fellow Ritchie Boys, returned, as well as the memory of a couple of hours I spent with a private from the Ranger Battalion, an elite assault troop, who, just a few days before, had climbed up those steep, heavily defended cliffs, topped by German strongholds. He was four years younger than I and was able to tell of his climbing those cliffs as though it had been a cake walk. We two had to see to it that waves of German prisoners were evacuated to a holding camp for transportation to England. He carried a rifle, but was in no way worried that one or more of the prisoners would make an attempt at escape. Completely in character he said to me, “Make them double time, Sergeant!” He meant make them run. He didn’t mind that he himself (and I) had to race alongside with our captives. I never saw him again, although I didn’t have to conjure up an image of him seventy years later; he stood before me as on that day in June.
I stopped during one forenoon at the US Military Cemetery to place a wreath near a memorial monument. The wreath was handed to me by French Count Charles de Maupeou, whose family’s nobility traces back to the thirteenth century. He owns a castle in nearby Colombières, shared with him by his father, who is alive and well and remembers not only the Invasion, but also, with fondness, several teams of Ritchie Boys. They had been bivouacked in his castle for a short time during and after the Invasion. “These memories,” said Charles de Maupeou Sr., “should never be forgotten, and new ones must be added! Hence, you Professor Stern, should spend your last day and night at the castle.” I did find myself there two days later, and rarely have I slept better.
My stay at Normandy became a movable feast. The mayor of Saint Mère Eglise gave a champagne reception in my honor. Not to be outdone, her counterparts at five other coastal towns pooled their resources and hosted a five-course banquet. As one of them whispered to me, they were miraculously able to forget their political rivalries and territorial disputes for this occasion. A newly founded community, Utah Beach, named after the code word for one of our invasion spots, presented me with a medal designating me as an honorary citizen.
Exorbitant praise, particularly of my college French, followed my public presentations about my activities at Foucarville of seventy-three years ago. In a spirit of noblesse oblige, Monsieur de Maupeou rented the local movie house for my speech, charged no admission, and provided me with an interpreter in the person of a local high school teacher for the inevitable question and answer period. He also corralled his three offspring to assist me in my presentation. They went far beyond his terse instructions. His daughter Marie, a student at the famous Paris University Sciences Politiques, continued to help with the arrangements for my visit. She had mounted posters announcing my presentations and assisted her father in writing opening remarks. The older son Nicolas, an engineer specializing in renewable energies, and his younger brother, Albéric, a student at a school of aeronautics, took charge of a copy of a recent film I had brought along, which gave a compact history of the Ritchie Boys, with me as the talking head. They inserted French translations into the documentary for the benefit of my French audience.
Why all the fuss for this one superannuated veteran and retired academician, I asked myself. I got the smattering of an answer toward the end of my stay. It seems my appearance among them reminded my well-wishers of a time when liberté, fraternité, egalité returned to them with the end of the Nazi occupation, and their traditional and revered order reemerged. In short, I was merely the catalyst of feelings remembered firsthand by some of my listeners, or passed on through the generations following them.
I returned from France glad that I had accepted the invitation of returning to the scene of the most eventful years of my life. I knew the added memories of those few days in Normandy with old and new admirable French friends would never leave me. And I felt a chapter of my life had now closed.
But it had not. A year passed. On a fall day, no different from all the others in Greater Detroit, I was following my daily routine. It always starts with swimming and exercises at 5:30 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center, consuming my wife’s precooked breakfast in the Center’s dressing room, and then rushing off to work. Upon coming home in the evening I usually glance at the day’s mail. On this fall day I did more than glance because a fairly large letter immediately caught my eye. The envelope displayed the French tricolore and the return address bore the seal of the French Consulate General in Chicago. I opened the letter and nearly dropped it after reading the opening sentence. “The Government of the French Republic is most pleased to bestow upon you the Legion of Honor, the highest award within its giving” or words to that effect.
Details were worked out quickly. The consul himself would present the medal; the Holocaust Memorial Center would assume the sponsorship, and the Jewish War Veterans would furnish the Honor Guard and both the French and American national anthems would be played at the beginning of the ceremony.
On that day, January 27, 2016, the large auditorium was completely filled. I spotted many of the people close to me in the audience. The consul gave an inspired speech about the liberation of France in 1944. He spoke in English and mentioned the Ritchie Boys several times. My response, to return the courtesy, was partially spoken in French, this time thanks to the translation skills of my colleague, Anne Duggan from Wayne State University. I had realized that the occasion could not have come more propitiously. I quoted a speech by the past French premier, who at the time of rising anti-Semitism had made a historic pronouncement. “France without Jews would not be France.”
I also declared that I accepted this high honor in the name of all the Ritchie Boys. I pointed out the Jewish background of so many of them, their achievements and the recognition they had received by a high-ranking Army historian, a specialist in Intelligence work during World War II. I thought it was fitting that I concluded my thank you speech by recalling a peaceful action in the midst of war: a kaddish, a Hebrew prayer for the dead, was held on French soil for the wife of one of us who had died in childbirth in far-away Brooklyn. It was equally fitting that the award ceremony was concluded by an ordained rabbi, our director, Eli Mayerfeld.
A reception followed the official aspects of the day’s proceeding, minutely arranged by Sarah Saltzman, in charge of Events Planning at HMC. As women and men, old and young, Christians and Jews, people of all walks of life approached me, showered me with kind words, and I was overwhelmed by contrasting emotions. I felt totally accepted and more, as if engulfed by a sea of affection. And then I said to myself: they are not really applauding you, because their approbation is going to a young man of twenty-two years who didn’t really know what he was doing. In consequence I was laughing at myself. And that sense of ludicrousness intensified when I reflected on the fact that
two-and-a-half years of my much earlier life should reverberate into my nineties. In a milder form that sense of humor carried me through the rest of the day. I could quip to the next well-wisher: “Okay, okay already! Sure, the consul made me a chevalier, but where is the cheval, the horse that should come with the medal?”
And to a broadly smiling Susanna I cackled: “I am suspicious of the consul general’s praise for my ‘soldierliness.’ You better widen my old uniform a bit. I think the French want to draft me for their next foreign conflict!”
But if I were to be asked, with all those emotions astir in me, which image from that day and from my stay in France arises most frequently before my mental eye, I can answer spontaneously: “The scene that followed my laying down that wreath handed me by Monsieur du Maupeou.”
A person whom I had never met before intuited my feelings. Professor Hyams’s daughter Judith, who had journeyed to her mother’s house from Berlin together with her bright ten-year-old child, wrote a feature about me for one of her German outlets, “Die Allgemeine Jüdische Zeitung.”
Descending from a car in Saint Mère Eglise, Guy Stern at first only has eyes for a baby in his stroller, being fed by his parents. “What a picture of peace and what a difference from the times of long ago,” the man of ninety-four years comments with a smile. “Naturally the remembrance of this giant bloodbath of the war comes back to me and with it the despairing recognition that all this carnage could have been prevented, if the politics of that time had only been more intelligent. But I look forward and hope that the world has learned something. It feels great to be here [at the scene of war] and yet to be so far removed from warfare.
