A MAN who survived the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp will be speaking at the CTC Kingshurst Academy next week.
Dr Martin Stern (pictured above) was just five-years-old when German soldiers arrived to arrest him at his nursery school in Amsterdam. The schoolboy's "crime" was that his father was a Jew.
He was taken, along with his one-year-old sister, to Theresienstadt - half way between a ghetto and fortress.
Tens of thousands lost their lives in the camp; many were murdered outright, others died as a result of malnutrition or disease.
"It was disgustingly overcrowded," said Dr Stern, during a previous visit to Solihull. "It stank to high heaven, and we couldn't wash properly. I probably wore the same clothes all the time I was there.
"There were fleas, bed bugs, mice...And towards the end of my time in that place, there was a typhus outbreak. It killed a lot of people, those who had not already died of starvation."
At the camp, Martin and his baby sister were cared for by a kindly woman, Catharina Casoeto de Jong, who had been incarcerated for marrying a Jewish market trader.
Mercifully the children were never called to be transported to Auschwitz - a worse camp still, where more than a million people perished.
In 1945, with Hitler's forces retreating across Europe, Martin awoke to discover the Red Army had liberated Theresienstadt. Of the 15,000 children who had been sent to the camp, the siblings were among the handful who had survived.
Dr Stern would go on to study at Oxford University and become an eminent immunologist in England. In recent years he has toured the country, talking to schoolchildren about his ordeal.
He has given several such talks at the CTC in recent years and will be returning for Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday (January 27),
The free talk will be taking place from 6-8pm. You can find out more here or call 0121 329 8300 to reserve seats.
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