AN AMAZING STORY
This 95-year-old Holocaust survivor has a roommate — she’s a 31-year-old granddaughter of Nazis
By
Colby Itkowitz March 2
Lea Heitfeld and Ben Stern. (Courtesy of Lea Heitfeld)
When the Nazis ripped his family from their home in Poland, Ben Stern survived the ghettos and the concentration camps by never losing faith in human kindness.
So now, at the end of his life, the 95-year-old has found an almost perfect antidote to how he was treated by the Nazis: Opening his California home to one of their descendants.
His roommate, Lea Heitfeld, is a 31-year-old German student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, whose grandparents were active and unrepentant members of the Nazi Party. Rather than shy away from her family’s history, it has inspired her to learn about Jewish people and educate others about their religion and what they endured during the Holocaust. She’s even getting her master’s degree in Jewish studies.
Welcoming Heitfeld, the kin of the very people who brutally forced him from his childhood home, to live as his roommate while she finishes her degree feels like “an act of justice,” Stern said in an interview. “It was the right thing to do. I’m doing the opposite of what they did.”
There is much about their living situation that defies norms: the sizable generation gap, the gender divide and, of course, the fact that they’re a Holocaust survivor and the granddaughter of Nazis. And yet they’ve both found they have so much to give each other.
A photo clipped from a newspaper from Helen and Ben Stern’s arrival in America in May 1946. (Courtesy: Charlene Stern)
Heitfeld provides companionship to Stern, whose wife of more than 70 years recently went into a nursing home because of her worsening dementia.
In the evenings, the unlikely pair watch TV together, usually the news. They have dinner together almost every night, and snack on herring salad and crackers before their meal — a mutual favorite. They have long conversations about history and current events and he tells her stories of his life in Poland before the war. Last semester, Stern, who never went to high school or college, audited a graduate class with her, and they walked together to campus every Thursday night.
For Heitfeld, Stern’s friendship is the rarest of gifts — an insight into human resiliency and compassion.
