This week we are privileged to receive a visit from Dr. Martin Stern (OM 1955 - 58). Martin was born in Hilversum in the Netherlands in June 1938 to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. The couple had fled Nazi Germany in 1935 due to the ban on intermarriage introduced as part of the Nuremberg laws. The family moved to Amsterdam in 1940, shortly after which the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands. It became increasingly difficult for Martin's father to continue making his living as an architect, and he switched to making wooden toys. He later went into hiding, joining the Dutch resistance under the protection of a network of families and individuals who hid Jewish people from the Nazis. Martin would later discover that his father was eventually discovered, tried to escape, shooting two soldiers in the process, but was captured and taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. He was then transferred to Buchenwald where he was murdered in 1945.
Martin's mother gave birth to his younger sister, Erica, but tragically died in childbirth, leaving the two children as effective orphans. Neighbours who had temporarily taken care of Martin whilst his mother was in labour, took the boy into their home, whilst baby Erica was fostered by friends of the family. The families were careful to keep the children's presence quiet; Martin's status as a Jew meant it was illegal for non-Jewish families to take care of him. Coincidentally, Martin lived a couple of streets from Anne Frank's family home. Eventually Martin was sent to school. In 1944, two soldiers arrived at the school and asked for Martin Stern:
"And the teacher immediately shot back ‘No, he hasn’t come in today.’ And there I was. I didn’t understand what was going on. I put my hand up, and I said, ‘But I am here.’ And as these two young men were leading me out of the room, I looked back, and I’ll never forget the ashen face of the young teacher."
Five year old Martin was arrested and was later tricked into revealing the identity of the family who had been caring for him. He subsequently learnt that they had been murdered in Neuengamme concentration camp.
Erica, now aged one, and Martin were sent to Westerbork prison camp, spending days crushed into a packed train.
"One bucket, for people to relieve themselves – men, women, children. No room to sit; we were squashed up against each other, we could only stand. And it wasn’t an express train. Sometimes it went at normal speeds, sometimes it went slowly for long periods, very slowly. And sometimes it stood still for long periods. And the whole journey – I don’t know how long it took – but my guess is three or four days and nights, it for sure wouldn’t have had priority on the German railway system, and towards the end of the journey, I remember asking the adults around me why an old man was lying on the floor of the truck, sleeping with his eyes open. I’d never seen a corpse."
Prisoners at Westerbork were normally moved to Auschwitz or another similar extermination camp. However Martin and his sister were instead moved to Theresienstadt. This was a Jewish ghetto about 40 miles north of Prague, designed to give the appearance to the outside world of a resettlement of Jews. The grim reality was that most of the inhabitants of Theresienstadt would eventually be transported to extermination camps, and the conditions in the ghetto were appalling. A Dutch woman, who Martin only knew as Mrs. de Jong, took the two unaccompanied children under her wing and lived with them in the women's dormitories; most children in the ghetto lived in separate quarters to the adults. Mrs. de Jong, though not Jewish herself, had married a Jew. She worked in the kitchens and stole food for the two children.
"This in a place where the SS would climb through a window of a dormitory, tell everybody to stand to attention, do it quickly and unexpectedly, [and] a man found with one cigarette in his pocket would be shot. And she was stealing food, when other people were dying. An inmate might have thought it was their good deed for the day to report her to the authorities. She was risking her life. And we never starved. I was darned hungry, but there’s a big difference between being darned hungry and being a pot-bellied skeleton."
Conditions were terrible, with scarce food and substandard hygiene. Martin remembers his skin being yellow and his urine the colour of coffee. Eventually the time came for the transportation of all the children from the ghetto to extermination camps. It seemed impossible for Martin and Erica to escape this fate, but Mrs. de Jong decided to attempt to come with them, and so accompanied them to the children's dormitories to await the train. Names were read out, but Erica and Martin were never called. The train, which was bound for Auschwitz, left without them; they had escaped the gas chambers. It may have been that by living with Mrs. de Jong in the women's' quarters, the children's names were missed off the official list.
May 1945 saw the liberation of the camp, and the children, still in the care of Mrs. de Jong, made the long journey back to the Netherlands. Martin and Erica were moved to the care of the family friends who had initially looked after Erica when their mother had died. After five years in the Netherlands, the children moved to Manchester to live with Martin's aunt. Martin was initially enrolled at a boarding school, but asked to leave, due to the anti-Semitism he experienced. Instead, he was sent to MGS in 1955 and stayed for three years before reading medicine at Brasenose College, Oxford.
"And I ended up having the good fortune to go to a wonderful school, Manchester Grammar School, which really saved me. No words of praise can be great enough."

Martin Stern (second from right) in the Spring 1958 edition of Ulula, interviewed alongside other boys who were interested in studying Medicine and other Scientific subjects at University

Martin Stern, 1957, taken from a Prefects photograph
After qualifying, he specialised in immunology, working in Dundee, Oxford, Manchester, London and Leicester. Upon retirement, he has worked for many years with the Holocaust Education Trust, sharing his story. He received an MBE for this work in 2018. Martin was finally reunited with Mrs. de Jong in the 1980s. We are delighted he has been able to return to MGS to talk to current boys.
“The most important thing is education. Ethnic hatred still exists all over the world, and we human beings are still flawed in that we easily get to hate people who are different from us. To counter that, you need to deal with that in education, not only with hatred against Jews, but with hatred against anybody because of who they are anywhere, rather than because they've done something hateful, for instance.”
It’s always wonderful to read about the triumph of good over evil and how Martin was able to rebuild his life grabbing the opportunities afforded him in England-no doubt MGS will have played a significant part in his development.
what a man!