Seventh-graders at Algonquin relive Lowenberg’s experience

By Erin McClary
C & G Staff Writer

CLINTON TOWNSHIP— In 1936, Holocaust survivor Martin Lowenberg was sent off to a Jewish boarding school after Nazis took over his hometown of Hessen, Germany. After several unsuccessful attempts by his parents to escape Hitler’s reign, Lowenberg entered into an experience he says he’s lucky to live to tell about.

On Nov. 14, Lowenberg told his story to more than 200 students at Chippewa Valley’s Algonquin Middle School. Because part of the seventh-grade curriculum at Algonquin is studying Europe and the persecution of different groups of people throughout history, social studies teacher Sarah Wills thought Lowenberg’s experience might catch her students’ attention.

“The kids are very astonished that anything like the Holocaust could have occurred in our history and how something so evil could happen to human beings just because of their religion and because of prejudice,” said Wills. “The purpose of the presentation is to learn about a horrible event in history, but not for shock value.  The teachers, and Mr. Lowenberg, want the students to learn about tolerance, respect and treating others the way they want to be treated, regardless of race or religion.”

Lowenberg stood before a group of students in a traditional Jewish yarmulke and relived his early-life experience during the Holocaust.

“Hitler wanted to have the whole country cleansed of Jews,” explained Lowenberg, who recalled seeing smoke coming from synagogues and Jewish neighbors being dragged and beaten throughout the streets on Nov. 9, 1938. “We were helpless. Everything was burning.”

At the time, Lowenberg was 10 years old. And unfortunately, 70 years later, he can’t recall anything positive about that time.

It was that year, beginning Nov. 10, that 36,000 Jewish men, ages 16 to 50 years old, were taken from there homes in Germany and Austria, and stripped of all their rights and dignity, said Lowenberg. And by March the following year, nearly every Jew was taken into concentration camps.

“Why? And what for?” Lowenberg asked students, who shook their heads in disbelief. “Because people can be mean and hurtful to others.”

Lowenberg told students about the humiliation of walking around bearing a yellow six-point star, which identified him as a Jew, and relived the experience of traveling in freight cars 80-people deep on a four-day trip with no beds or pillows.

“The train started to roll. We had no idea where we were going,” he said.

And after stepping off the train, he and the others were forced to march five miles in the bitter cold to their new homes in the ghetto. The homes that made up the ghetto, which was located in Riga, Latvia, he described as dilapidated and infested with cockroaches, bedbugs and rats.

That was in 1943, the same year he last saw his parents and younger siblings; and the same year he was reunited with his sister, who’d been taken away by Nazi soldiers years before.

Lowenberg spent six weeks in quarantine and nine months in rehabilitation after the Holocaust before he and his sister moved to the United Sates.

“I love this country, and I know this country loves me,” he told students. “Because I am free here.”

“(Students) are even more compassionate when they see that (the Holocaust) affected a real live person that is standing in front of them … not just learning about it through a movie or reading about it in a book,” said Wills about Lowenberg’s presentation. “It adds a personal element to the picture.”

Lowenberg travels all over the country telling his traumatic story in hopes of reaching students and adults on the significance of Holocaust education. At a conference in Europe last year, he shared letters that previous Algonquin seventh-graders wrote to him after his visit to the school.

“With all the bullying and school violence that exists today, this is an imperative message,” Wills added. “These students are our future leaders, and we need to educate them so negative history does not repeat itself.” 

You can reach Staff Writer Erin McClary at emcclary@candgnews.com or at (586) 279-1118.