Oxford Middle School seventh-graders last week received an emotional and graphic lesson about hate from an 81-year-old Holocaust survivor.
‘Try not to use the word hate because I know what hate means,? said Martin Lowenberg, a German-born Jew who now lives in Southfield. ‘I lived with hate for 12 of my best years, from the time I was 5 years old until the time I was 17.?
It was the Nazis? blind hatred of the Jews and others they deemed inferior that forced Lowenberg’s family to be deported from Germany to a squalid ghetto in Riga, Latvia.
It was hate that put a 15-year-old Lowenberg and his older sister, Eva, in the Kaiserwald concentration camp where they were worked like slaves and starved like animals.
It was hate that sent Lowenberg’s parents and younger twin brothers to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland after which they were never seen again.
‘I was hated simply because of my religion,? he said. ‘I hadn’t done anything wrong.?
By sharing his experiences with students, Lowenberg hopes to teach them the true nature of hate and encourage them to choose a path of love, knowledge, tolerance and respect for one another.
‘Hate hurts, but love heals,? he said. ‘You can get much more with love. For hate, we don’t give any gifts do we? For hate, we don’t have any holidays do we? But we do for love.?
Unfortunately, love did not rule the day when one of history’s most evil men, Adolf Hitler, became leader of Germany on January 30, 1933.
A month-and-a-half later, the Lowenbergs? home in the town of Schenklengsfeld was burned. What wasn’t destroyed in the fire was looted by hate-filled people.
Though the family had lived in Germany since 1681, the Lowenbergs were now considered to be outsiders, enemies to be feared and reviled simply because they prayed in Hebrew.
‘We were German and that’s all we knew,? Lowenberg said. ‘That’s why we could not understand what happened to us and that’s why we did not leave Germany.?
Hate was added to the curriculum of the public school Lowenberg attended when his teacher decided to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in April 1936 by having four boys severely beat him in front of the class.
‘They kicked me. They punched me. Spat in my face,? he said. ‘I was so humiliated. It hurt so badly.?
The teacher then took out a board lined with the sharp points of thumb tacks, placed it on a chair and pushed Lowenberg on top of it.
‘Believe me, it hurt. It hurt very badly.?
At that point, his sister, Eva, ran screaming out of the school and headed for home. Once the bell rang and the beating stopped, Lowenberg walked home from what became his last day in public school.
‘People didn’t want me to learn,? he said.
Determined to receive an education, Lowenberg spent two years at a Jewish boarding school located 150 miles away from his home.
During this time, things got worse for Germany’s Jews.
They were forbidden to ride on public transportation. They couldn’t have telephones or listen to the radio. They weren’t allowed to ride in automobiles or sit on park benches. Signs indicated that Jews were not wanted popped up everywhere. Jewish-owned businesses were demonized and boycotted.
‘We were not allowed to go swimming because we would make the water dirty,? Lowenbeg said. ‘That’s how people were thinking.?
In 1938, a new law decreed that all Jews must sell their property. The Lowenbergs were forced to sell their home and a piece of land for the lowest price. The money they received was then aggressively taxed.
‘They called it the Jew tax,? Lowenberg said.
The family was forced to leave their town and rent an apartment in the city of Fulda.
Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism turned brutally violent on November 9, 1938 when all over the country Jewish shops were ransacked, Jewish homes destroyed and hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground.
Inspired by the multitude of windows smashed by rock-throwing thugs, the incident was dubbed ‘Kristallnacht,? which literally means ‘Crystal Night.? It’s also referred to as the ‘Night of Broken Glass.?
Lowenberg was at school when rocks came crashing through the windows injuring many of his classmates.
But it wasn’t just Jewish property that was destroyed. ‘They took people from their homes and beat them up in the middle of the street,? Lowenberg said. ‘There were streaks of blood all over.?
The next day, a police officer came to arrest Lowenberg’s father, who had committed no crime. His father, a German veteran of World War I, spent four weeks at the Buchenwald concentration camp, then was released.
‘Others were there much longer than that,? Lowenberg said. ‘Some never ever came back again to their families.?
In 1941, the Nazi regime decided to mark all Jews over the age of 6 living in the Reich by forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David with the word ‘Jude? (Jew) inscribed on it whenever they went out in public. This mark ensured that whenever a Jew ventured onto the street, he or she would be followed, harassed and assaulted.
‘I’ll never forget one of the boys, a little boy, came up to me and rubbed my face with cottage cheese,? Lowenberg said.
The crowd watching this spectacle thought it was so ‘cute? what this boy was doing to this Jew. ‘I didn’t think it was so cute. It hurt my pride,? Lowenberg said.
Humiliation was soon followed by deportation. In December 1941, the Lowenbergs, along with thousands of other Jews, were loaded onto trains and taken to Riga, Latvia. When they arrived, those who couldn’t make the five-mile walk to their new homes ? old people, little children, etc. ? were loaded into trucks.
‘They never saw them again,? Lowenberg said. ‘They were taken away and they were taken into a forest where they were killed in cold blood.?
The Lowenbergs new home was the Riga ghetto, vacant homes with no furniture or running water, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
The previous occupants of this ghetto, all 30,000 of them, were evacuated in two days, taken into the forest and shot.
For the next year-and-a-half, the Jews in the Riga ghetto were marched into the city and forced to work every single day. The Lowenbergs were just grateful they were still together as a family.
But that all changed with Lowenberg and his sister, Eva, were sent to the nearby Kaiserwald concentration camp to live and work as slaves.
Because his parents, Sally and Klara, were over the age of 50 and his younger twin brothers, Fritz and Kurt, were under 15, they were loaded onto trains and taken to Auschwitz, an extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million people, about 90 percent of whom were Jews, were put to death. Most were killed in gas chambers and their bodies burned in crematoriums.
‘I had to say good-bye to them and I said good-bye to them forever because I never ever saw them again,? Lowenberg said. ‘That was the day I became an orphan at the age of 15.?
To this day, Lowenberg hopes his twin brothers didn’t fall into the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele. Known as ‘The Butcher of Auschwitz? and ‘The Angel of Death,? Mengele is infamous for his sadistic experiments on Jewish inmates, particularly twins.
‘It hurts me every time to even say what he did because you can’t imagine what he did,? Lowenberg said. ‘He killed over 300 twins because he was doing research, experiments on twins. Can you just imagine a doctor killing? And he enjoyed it.
‘I only hope that my two little twin brothers were not the subjects of his experiments and went right into the gas chamber with my parents. But I don’t know and I will never know.?
From August 1943 until September 1944, Lowenberg endured the wretched life at Kaiserwald. He endured the forced labor. He endured starvation. He endured wearing the same ragged, dirty striped uniform every day and every night. He endured being made to squat for 22 hours straight, all the while wondering if he was going to be shot.
But most importantly, he endured. He survived. Ultimately, Lowenberg and his sister, Eva, immigrated to the United States in 1946 where they were reunited with their sister, Margot, who had left Germany. The three of them were joined in the 1950s by another sister and brother, Berta and Hans, who had fled Germany in the 1930s for Palestine.
Lowenberg helped defeat Hitler’s ultimate plan of annihilating the Jewish people by marrying, having three daughters and a bunch of happy grandchildren.
‘And believe me, they are grand,? he said.
Lowenberg encouraged OMS students to continue their education because that’s the key to preventing the type of ignorance and hate which allowed the Nazis? rise to power.
‘The more you learn, the better person you are and the better person you will be because you’ll go to places, wonderful places,? he said. ‘But learn the right way and not the wrong way.?
‘Hitler tried to take everything away from us . . . The thing he could never take away from us is knowledge, things that we already knew, things that we already learned.?
Lowenberg also urged students to ‘get to know people, meet people? and respect others.
‘They’re not any different than you are.?