The gym vibrated with chatter, laughs, shuffles — an energetic if restrained school time hum. When Martin Lowenberg entered, the sound instantly became an expectant hush.
The seventh and eight grade students at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Middle School watched patiently, eyes riveted, as he clipped on his portable microphone. After an introduction, Lowenberg greeted students in a deep voice heavy with his German origins.
He launched into his personal witness of Hitler's Germany, Kristallnacht, slave labor, the death camps and the acceptance of evil by too many in a country his family called home for generations. You could have heard a pin drop.
"Why is it called the Holocaust? How many people were killed in the Holocaust?” he asked in turn, answering his own questions methodically.
Nearly 80, Lowenberg is aflame with determination to share his story, to ensure that those who term the Holocaust a myth or exaggerated do not gain ground with their lies.
"It is all the more pertinent in the wake of gathering Holocaust deniers in Iran,” said Lowenberg of a 2006 conference. "If the president of Iran says it never happened, you can say you heard differently from someone who survived.”
At St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, teachers had read Elie Wiesel's account of Nazi Germany, "Night,” aloud to the seventh and eighth grade students. Students also read "The Hiding Place” by Corrie Ten Boom.
"We feel there is an urgency about it because they are aging and we want to reach as many as possible,” said Nancy Martin, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at the school.
Addey Meachum, a seventh grade student, said hearing the account directly was different than just reading about it.
"The horror and everything that all of them went through, it's just really hard to imagine,” she said.
Lowenberg, a Southfield, Mich. resident, is visiting the region for the week to share his story, giving 21 presentations at 11 different schools to grades seven and up. Monday's busy schedule also included talks in Glen Lake and at Traverse City East Junior High. He travels on behalf of Michigan's Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit.
A native of the village of Schenklengsfeld, the Lowenbergs considered themselves Germans until the Nazis came to power. They had lived in the country since the late 1600s and his father was a decorated World War I veteran.
"We were German through and through,” he said. "We just didn't settle there, we had lived there, we didn't know anything else.”
"We spoke German but we prayed in Hebrew,” he added of his Orthodox Jewish family.
Lowenberg was five in 1932 when suddenly his family became only Jews in the eyes of the state, teachers, neighbors and everyone else. He vividly described a tightening noose of oppression and persecution, with his family losing everything, being driven from their home, of wearing the yellow star, of his teachers, classmates and complete strangers attacking him.
"I was humiliated, abused, tortured, tormented - just name it and I was there,” said Lowenberg. "What they didn't destroy, they looted because they didn't want 'those Jews.'”
The attitude, he said, was: "Go to Palestine with the rest of the Jews, we want to be cleansed of the Jews.” Hitler nearly achieved his goal as 6 million European Jews were slaughtered, along with millions of others who did not go along with Hitler plus the gypsies, the disabled or sick, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and other religions.
Lowenberg's older siblings did emigrate to Palestine before the worst hit and survived. A sister and younger twin brothers stayed in Germany. All but Lowenberg and this sister, also of the right age to work in slave labor camps, perished in death camps.
They emerged at World War II's end in 1945 emaciated shells of young adults, their childhood stolen.
"It's hard to believe that any human being could survive such horror, such hate,” Lowenberg said of the Holocaust. "You should be glad you are in this country, the greatest country in the world and I can vouch for that because 12 years of my youth was taken from me.”