Ben Stern, Holocaust survivor who challenged neo-Nazis, 102

Stern, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, nine Nazi concentration camps, and two death marches, helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s. He also spoke to hundreds of audiences about Antisemitism and prejudice. Stern, a Polish-born Jew, lost his parents, his sister, and six of his seven brothers in the Holocaust. He evaded the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi camps and was marched for weeks before his liberation in 1945.

In the US, Stern established a chain of laundromats across Chicago and settled with his family in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish community and an estimated 6,000 Holocaust survivors.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin, announced plans for a rally in Skokie. In a legal battle that ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Stern joined other activists to try to stop them.

The neo-Nazis were represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose principal lawyer faced death threats for arguing that even speech as abhorrent as that of neo-Nazis must be defended if the First Amendment protection of free speech is to last. The neo-Nazis won their legal proceedings because their speech was rules to be protected under the First Amendment. But they canceled their rally in Skokie, partially because they were faced with a massive counter-demonstration organized by Jewish groups and activists including Stern, who had written letters to the editor, appeared on television, gathered petitions, and rallied people to the cause.

Stern later spoke to hundreds of audiences about his experience in the Holocaust. He also protested anti-Muslim bigotry in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.

Stern once talked with Ira Glasser, who, after becoming executive director of the ACLU in 1978, had strongly defended its representation of the neo-Nazis in their petition to gather in Skokie. Scheduled to speak together on a panel in California, Stern and Glasser met at the airport and Stern extended to him a hand and said, “We’re not going to agree, but we’re going to be friends.” “There was no meeting of the minds,” Glasser later commented. “His agony was too imprinted on his soul by what happened to him. And I remember thinking that if I were in his [place], I would probably be taking the same position.” Stern’s defiance, Glasser said, had been “heroic.”

Stern and his daughter wrote his 2022 memoir, Near Normal Man: Survival with Courage, Kindness and Hope (Redwood Publishing). She also produced a documentary based on the book, which is available on YouTube. 

*****

Read the March 12, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the February 5, 2023 Berkeleyside article.

 Book Review

A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

Elie Wiesel, fwd. Little, Brown and Company: 2009. Pp xvi, 228. $24.99.

This memoir by the late Thomas Buergenthal (1934-2023), a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague as well as in several other human rights courts, tells how his survival of Auschwitz which he entered at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp influenced his long career as a stellar human rights lawyer and advocate. As the Amazon book description concludes: "A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all."

"It was more than luck and the good for­tune of his ​“Aryan” fea­tures that enabled him to sur­vive the war — it was his strength, wis­dom, and enor­mous faith that he would one day sur­vive and be reunit­ed with his parents. Amaz­ing­ly, Thomas was reunit­ed with his moth­er short­ly after the war and then moved to the Unit­ed States and began a career as lawyer and then as a judge. He has ded­i­cat­ed his career to fight­ing against the human rights vio­la­tions that he expe­ri­enced as a child."

*****

Sources:

(1) Amazon book description.

(2) Read the book review in ReformJudaism.org.

(3) Read the December 22, 2011 Jewish Book Council book review.

(4) Photo courtesy of Amazon.com.

 Obituary: 

Thomas Buergenthal, Human Rights Lawyer, 89

Buergenthal was an international law jurist and human rights defender who was as a boy one of the youngest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as a three-day Nazi death march to Sachsenhausen, Germany. He had a major role in establishing international jurisprudence's framework, stemming from U.N. declarations since the 1960s often called the “International Bill of Human Rights.” In 1992, the U. S. ratified the core document, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 

As a justice of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979-1991), Buergenthal judged cases about allegations of rights abuses by U.S.-allied governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras against leftist guerrillas and their supporters. One case, the disappearance of suspected government opponents in Honduras, led to new interpretations of the burden of proof. Buergenthal and the other judges decided that it could consider the overall pattern of disappearances, setting a “rebuttable presumption” of government involvement. Authorities would now have to prove they had no role in a specific incident, rather than relying on a lack of evidence to exonerate them. In 1993, Buergenthal was part of a U.N. commission that found Salvadoran military officers responsible for so-called “dirty war” crimes, including the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. 

Buergenthal was vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal, which examined requests made by the families of Holocaust victims seeking assets deposited in Swiss banks until 1945. Tens of millions of dollars were estimated to be in accounts hidden from heirs by Swiss banking laws. He also wrote a memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (See Interesting Books in this issue). He also served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, honorary president of the American Society of International Law (2001-2009), and as a law professor. 

*****

Sources:

Read an article about Buergenthal in the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Read the June 3, 2023 Washington Post obituary.

Read the June 2, 2023 New York Times obituary.

Photo courtesy of the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.