Holocaust Survivor Brings Message Of Home To Novi Students

From NCSD: On the last Monday of the 2016-17 school year, Martin Lowenberg brought his message of love and tolerance to a new group of fifth graders at Novi Meadows Elementary School. For the 22nd straight year, the Holocaust survivor has shared details about the Nazi atrocities that he and his family experienced inside the barbwire fences of concentration camps during World War II.

Now 89 years old, Lowenberg’s message from year to year hasn’t wavered much since he first spoke to Novi Meadows fifth graders in 1995.

“Love is a wonderful word,” he said. “Hate hurts, but love heals.”

Lowenberg’s story began 84 years ago when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and systematically persecuted and murdered six million Jews – including his parents and twin brothers – between 1933 and 1945.

A Holocaust educator for more than a quarter century, Lowenberg continues to speaker regularly at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., as well as at community events and schools throughout Michigan.

The fifth of seven children, Lowenberg told the Meadows students about synagogues that were burned down by Nazis and their collaborators, about sleeping standing up while packed into boxcars during resettlement trips, and the physical tortured he endured at the hands of his public school teachers when they accused him of sticking his tongue out at a framed picture of Hitler.

In 1941, Nazis forced the Lowenberg family to move to a Jewish ghetto in Riga, Latvia. A year later, Lowenberg, then 15, was separated from his family and taken to a work camp. He said he later learned that his parents and nine-year-old brothers were transported to Auschwitz, where they were killed. The twins never met their three oldest siblings, who escaped Germany before the atrocities started.

When Lowenberg was finally liberated to Sweden in 1945, he weighed just 76 pounds. He and an older sister, Eva, survived separate slave labor camps and each immigrated to the U.S. following the war. Eva is 93 years old and lives in New York.

According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, about 100,000 Jews who were in camps, ghettos and hiding under Nazi occupation were still alive in 2016, which was down from 500,000 living survivors in 2014.

Lowenberg, who lives in Southfield, Mich., told the 400-plus students that it’s important for current generations and those who will follow to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities.

“That’s why I’m here, to tell you what happened to me,” he said. “When you sit here and look at each other you don’t realize what a wonderful future you’re going to have, what a wonderful life you’re going to have, what wonderful teachers you have who try to teach you the right way and not the wrong way.

“What do I mean the wrong way?

“They don’t teach you how to hate. No. They teach you how to listen, how to love.”

Gauging his early-morning audience, Lowenberg, continued, “You should never say, ‘No, I don’t want to get up.’ You should be glad that you’re able to get up because they (Holocaust victims) couldn’t. That’s what happened.”

Photo courtesy of Novi Community School District