Pictured left Five extended family members killed in the Holocaust. Newman’s family had no idea these people ever existed. The oldest child, named Lucien Najman, front left, looks remarkably like his father. 10 northern today News northern The journey Newman describes the young Henry as an adolescent boy who “ … traveled throughout five countries, often illegally; learned four languages; put his life in the hands of complete strangers and lost some of the most important people in his life.” After being driven from their home in Vienna, Henry, his parents and siblings went to Brussels, Belgium, hoping to sail to the United States. Before they could do that, Germans invaded Belgium. Henry Newman’s father was arrested and interned. Henry and his mother escaped to France just before it, too, was invaded. Ten-year-old Henry was bewildered, Newman said. “He couldn’t understand why Hitler hated him and his mother and father,” Newman said. “His family was not devoutly Jewish.” When he was 13, Henry and his mother were sent to a concentration camp outside Paris, where Henry befriended a French guard who helped him escape. The boy made his way alone across the country to stay with family in the south of France. The fate of Henry’s mother – Newman’s great-grandmother – is not recorded, but Newman can surmise. “I have found the train number with which she was sent to Auschwitz. Eight of 10 people sent there were killed, so it’s fairly likely she was killed.” Henry’s sisters made it safely to the U.S. Later in life, Henry didn’t reveal ill effects from the ordeal, Newman said. “He wasn’t negative about anything in life. He was always a very happy person. He appreciated he had made it out of that and went to where he could lead a happy life.” Newman feels as though Henry’s descendants share his positive outlook and tolerant attitude. “He got this idea out of that: Don’t hate people based on who they are, because they can’t choose that. I might be idealizing, but that’s always the message I got from him: ‘Be a caring person.’ I can’t imagine it wasn’t forged by this experience.” The project Newman took a crash course in German from Northern’s Dr. Ginny Lewis, and planned to make use of his two years of high-school French. The grant from Northern, awarded in October 2012, funded about ¾ of the transportation and lodging costs of the trip. Newman planned to stay in hostels and buy his own food. He’s thankful his grant application was successful. “Without that grant, this wouldn’t have been feasible,” he said. To develop a sense of what life may have been like for his grandfather and other Jews in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Newman planned to stop in every major city through which his grandfather traveled: Vienna, Brussels, Paris, Pau, Toulouse and Lyon. Newman mapped out a route pinpointed with tidbits of information - his grandfather’s addresses in Vienna and Brussels; the name of cousins with a shop in Paris; a second cousin on his grandmother’s side living just outside Vienna. Newman also planned to stop in temples and synagogues to search their archives - an invaluable hands-on opportunity, since many genealogical records are not online. Newman fervently hoped to find one elusive but priceless bit of information: the name of the guard who befriended and saved his grandfather in the Paris camp. “I would really like to find this guy to find if he has descendants. My entire family owes a lot to this person.” “Without that grant, this wouldn’t have been feasible,” he said.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzkyNTY=