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When he was 17, Harold Stern worked in a fountain pen factory as he and his mother tried to leave their country for America. They wanted to escape the persecution of being Jewish in Nazi Germany.
Even though Stern had to pay to be able to work at the Jewish-owned factory, it provided him a place to go every morning, nearly two years since he had to leave school.
The morning of Jan. 7, Beverly Anderson, 17, and her classmates at the Mount Saint Joseph Academy woke up and went to school almost like any average Thursday, except that day their world history teacher planned a special lesson on the Holocaust.
After listening to Stern’s first-hand account of growing up as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, Anderson didn’t want to go to her next class. She wanted to hear more.
When Stern looked at his watch and realized time was almost up — just as he was on a ship from England to Australia — Anderson didn’t want to leave.
“Please keep going,” she said from her front row seat.
Last week was one of the few times Stern, of Willow Grove, had spoken in public about his experience.
“I enjoy talking to people who are interested and I’m very happy to discuss what happened in those days because it’s ancient history to people who are growing up now,” he said.
Stern was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1921 and was about 12 when the Nazi party came to power.
In the early to mid-1930s he attended school at a place called the Humanistic Gymnasium. Eventually many of his German classmates joined the Hitler Youth.
“The teachers, who were mostly German nationalists, didn’t want much to do with the Jews for their own protection,” he said.
At one point he stopped talking to his German friends because he didn’t want to get them into trouble.
“It got harder and harder to live a normal existence,” he said.
With five years of French and two of Latin under his belt, he left the Humanistic Gymnasium because it was impractical for him to be there.
His mom had lost her clients because they were worried about working with a Jewish woman, so Stern’s family needed income. They wanted to save money to pay the taxes required to leave the country and go to America.
In 1937 he began classes at a Jewish school, where instead of singing songs touting German nationalism, he was introduced to classical music.
He took classes for six months before getting a job, at age 15, at a Jewish friend’s father’s shoe factory. A Nazi official was planning on taking over the factory and fought Stern’s hiring.
“In spite of tremendous chicanery, I at least had a reason to get up in the morning,” he said.
He ate lunch with his co-workers early in his employment, but as the climate in the country worsened, Stern had to eat elsewhere to save his German co-workers from punishment.
This was one of the saddest parts of the story for Anderson and her friends to hear, they said.
As the atmosphere in Germany became progressively worse, with “people emigrating left and right,” Stern lost friends, confidants and relatives who moved away.
“It was a terrible atmosphere because you had no longer any semblance of a normal existence,” he said.
Stern left the factory after it was sold to a non-Jewish enterprise because there was no future for him there. He worked at the Jewish-owned fountain pen factory before finding a way to England right before the start of World War II.
At age 17 he had to separate from his mother, who he later learned died at 43 while living in poverty in Holland, where she had moved right before the war.
In England during the war, Stern was eventually interned and sent to Australia to a camp with 200 refugees. He joined the Australian army after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Amy Gwynn, 18, marveled at Stern’s ability to live through such a difficult time, and said she couldn’t imagine doing it at her age.
“The fact that he had so much survival ethic — I would have fallen apart,” she said.
Kiersten Brinkos, 17, had a renewed appreciation for the present.
“To just be grateful … for the opportunities I’m given now,” she said.
In 1947 Stern arrived in New York, and represented several department store window display companies on the Eastern seaboard before retiring in 1989. e has been married for 53 years, has two sons and four grandchildren.
