OPERATION OVERLORD SAVED MY LIFE, By Jiri Valenta, June 6, 2014

Whenever I hear the first sounds of Beethoven´s 5^th  -- the allied signal for the liberation of Europe -- I recall those who fought  and died in Normandy on D-Day.  But on this 70^th anniversary of one of the greatest crusades for liberty and freedom,  I am also acutely aware that, without Operation Overlord, I would not be here.  Several of my Jewish relatives, including my great grandfather, Arnold Stein, and his daughter, my Aunt Ella, perished in a gas chamber already in 1942.  Their names are on the walls of the Pinkus synagogue of the Jewish Museum in Prague along with those of the extensive Stein clan of Prague and Celechovice. My Aunt, Irma Stein, after whom I named my older daughter, Irma Esther, spent the war in the concentration camp, Terezin. 

 

Both my surviving Christian and Jewish relatives believe that the only reason my mother survived was that days after D-Day, she became pregnant with me.  As my Christian, Czech grandfather, Frantisek, put it, “Because she was carrying you in her stomach, she is alive.”  Both her life and mine, in fact,  hung on the turn of the inclement weather  that permitted the seaborne invasion of  Normandy.



I was born in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, not far from the Sudetenland.  Frantisek´s daughter was my mother, Jirina.  According to Jewish law, she was Jewish because she had a Jewish mother --Frantisek´s wife,  my grandmother, Fanny.  But  according to the German Nuremberg  laws, since she had a Christian father she was half Jewish and non-Aryan.  The Nazis were nothing if not methodical.  They graded the Jews according to their degree of Jewish blood and exterminated them accordingly.   My mother was thus a mischling [mixed race] of the "first grade."  Yet since my grandfather and  my father were both Christian, I was a mischling of the "second grade."  Thus, my pregnant mother´s extermination was postponed long enough for the war to end and her to survive. 

I am currently working with my wife, Leni Friedman Valenta, on my memoir, “Are you Starting a Revolution Here?”  Among other issues, it fills a historical void in that very little has been written about the fate of the mischlings  in German- occupied lands.  The fact is that  most of the Jews who survived in occupied Czechoslovakia, and perhaps elsewhere, were either mischlings or married to Christians.

Unfortunately, my Christian father could not marry my mother until after liberation because of the Nuremberg laws.  Neither did it help that he became a guerilla fighter in the Czech resistance.  I was born in the basement of my mother´s future Christian in-laws, where my mother took shelter from falling allied bombs.

The Nazi´s, however,  were not only methodical, but  also diabolic and Wagnerian.  As it slowly became clear after D-Day that they would lose the war, they  intensified their pogroms against the mischlings, determined to cleanse every drop of Jewish blood from Europe. Now also included in the roundup were the so called “white Jews,” Christians who refused to divorce their Jewish spouses so that they could be gassed. Two of these were grandfather, Frantisek, and my Russian uncle, Ivan Suprun,  both of whom were sent to a concentration camp in Poland. In September 1944,  as the Americans and British were trying to find a way through Belgium to Germany from the West, and the Russians were coming through Poland from the East, a second wave of pogroms ensued.  My 17 year old uncle, Lada, was sent to a Czech labor camp, Bystrice. 

My aunt Irma,  incarcerated at Terezin  for several years, never forgot the husky, vodka-scented, Russian soldiers, “who entered our barracks and tore the yellow stars off our prison clothes.” She would later remind me of the sacrifice of the Russian people in WWII.  “There are dozens of cemeteries in Russia like the one at Omaha Beach." As I have learned in my decades-long  studies, she was right.  Many simple Russian soldiers, conditioned perhaps by their own enormous losses, did not display anti-Semitism against the concentration camp inmates. 





My grandparents, Fanny and Frantisek, and my uncles, Ivan and Lada, all survived.  Not only were the resistance fighters throughout Europe, dependent on liberation by the allies, but also the remaining Jews, "white Jews,"  and mischlings not yet slaughtered.  We all depended on them for our lives. This is a true story.  I am here today to write it.

Excerpt from Are you Starting a Revolution Here, Copyright, Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta, 2014

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