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First Posted: 1/2/2015

Back in Germany in 1933, an SS commander singled out a young, blond German boy who was on vacation in Berchtesgaden with his family.

“This is an example of a fine young Aryan boy,” the commander told his troops. “This is what we are fighting for.”

The troops had no idea the boy’s vacation was actually his bar mitzvah present. Fritz Schwager, was Jewish — part of the ethnic group Adolf Hitler wanted to exterminate.

Fortunately, the boy’s family sent to the United States before anything horrible happened to him. He settled in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and today his son, attorney David Schwager of Kingston, remembers his family’s story.

The Times Leader reached out to Holocaust survivors to commemorate the 71st anniversary of the start of the Holocaust. First-hand accounts of the tragedy are dwindling, but their family can still tell their stories.

Before the war

David Schwager said his parents, Fred Schwager and Margot Neumann, grew up happily in their German homeland until things grew tense.

“Their friends stopped talking to them,” Schwager said. “They couldn’t go to the public school anymore. They knew things were changing. My grandfather was a decorated veteran of World War I and he fought for Germany. They were entrenched in their community and it was remarkable to them to be treated in this fashion.”

Schwager’s grandparents had owned a prominent leather business in Cham called Gebrüder Schwager, but they lost it in a forced sale to non-Jewish workers. They lost their home the same way, although they did get some money for it, which they later used to pay for visas.

Another local man, Dr. Matthew Berger, remembers how his father, the late Dr. Steven Berger, was reluctant to talk about the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Poland. But eventually, Dr. Steven Berger shared his story with his son.

After studying medicine in France, the senior Berger returned to his native Poland to practice obstetrics and gynecology. He had a fiancee and was looking forward to starting his new life. A life he never got to live.

In September 1939, the Nazi Army invaded Poland and Polish Jews were immediately rounded up into ghettos. A Polish-Christian family managed to hide Berger for about eight months but ultimately he was found.

“It was very similar to Anne Frank, if I had to give a reference,” Berger said. His father told him, “It was cramped and silent. They didn’t want to talk in fear of being found. However, even though they were ratted out, everyone who hid in that attic survived.”

Polish-Jews continued to be imprisoned and ultimately were deported to slave labor camps and concentration camps.

“My father stood in line to await which camp he would go to, a death camp or a work camp,” Berger said. “The SS officer asked him what he did and he responded, ‘I’m a physician.’ Well, they didn’t need physicians and the officer pointed toward essentially my fathers death. My father said, ‘Well, wait, I’m young and strong. What do you need done?’ The officer replied that they needed people to lay pipe and my father told him ‘I can do that,’ so they sent him to a work camp. He knew where he could have been headed so he did what he had to do to survive.”

An early escape

David Schwager’s uncle, Sigmund, was riding a train in 1933 when he picked up a book to read.

“It just happen to be “Mein Kampf,” Schwager said, referring to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto. Sigmund Schwager never returned to his hometown. ” He summoned his wife and children and moved them to Palestine. He knew (Germany) was not a place where they had a future.”

Others did not dodge the bullet.

Kristallnacht

On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, which came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, and Jewish people were killed.

Two of Schwager’s grandparents were rounded up by the Nazis.

“My mother’s parents were taken to the police station in the nearby city of Aschaffenberg,” he said. “They were eventually allowed to go back to their home, but immediately saw their lives were changing.”

When his grandparents got home, their street was named #1 Adolf Hitler Strasse, and their home was now the Jewish ghetto.

“My grandparents were ultimately sent to a concentration camp in the then Czech Republic called Theresienstadt,” Schwager said. “My mother always told me this was a ‘good’ concentration camp but, this was just a transit point for them.”

Later, Schwager’s maternal grandparents were taken to the extermination camp of Treblinka. When they stepped off the train, they were taken to the outskirts of the camp, shot and killed.

“All of their children made it to the U.S.,” Schwager said. “My mother received letters from her parents at the concentration camp saying how their spirits were high. But their time ran out.”

Schwager’s father’s parents were also taken from their home. His grandmother was taken to a police station in Regensburg and his father was taken to Dachau, a concentration camp outside Munich. The Schwager Villa became the German Army induction station.

“This was not a ‘good’ camp,” Schwager stated. “The most interesting thing about the camp was it was on the bus line from Munich. It was in a neighborhood. Imagine living in south Wilkes-Barre and having a concentration camp in your backyard.”

Eventual freedom

While Berger’s father laid pipe and dug ditches in a Nazi camp for about a year, a simple gold chain helped keep him alive. He would trade the links of his necklace for scraps of food.

While he had some gold left, he had a little bit of leverage, Berger said.

The senior Berger managed to survive. As the war was drawing to a close, a German guard befriended him and told him that if he ran away, the guard would look the other way.

“My father went back to the barracks to tell the others, but most believed the guard was lying and if they ran, they would get shot,” Berger recalled. “It was just him and two others who escaped. The whole camp was killed the next, just as the guard had said.”

‘Voyage of the Damned’

With the money from the forced sale of their home, Albert and Theresia Schwager purchased Cuban visas and boarded the MS Saint Louis, hoping to find a new home.

When they arrived there, David Schwager said, they learned Cuba’s immigration laws had changed and their visas would not be honored. “My grandfather said he would jump off the ship before he went back to Germany.”

However, the Schwagers learned several countries would welcome them, among them France, Belgium, Holland and Great Britain.

On the recommendation of their son Albert, whom they had sent to the United States years earlier, they chose England, where they learned to speak English and prepared for a new life in America.

“As a 19-year-old, my father unknowingly saved his parents lives,” Schwager said. “France, Holland and Belgium fell to the Nazis.”

The worst is over

Berger’s father headed east toward Russia and was drafted into the Russian Air Force Prisoner of War camp as a physician. “He then followed the front back to Germany,” Berger said.

Later he made his way to the United States and prepared for a new medical specialty, psychiatry. Berger heard stories of his father before the war. He was once an outgoing, young man but the war changed him.

“He liked the quiet,” Berger said. “He would stay away from commotion. For fun he would go to the library. He didn’t want to make waves because during the war, if you made waves, you were killed.”