I’m Still Here: Albert Hepner

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Welcome to the Moth Podcast.

I'm Michelle Jalowski, a director and producer at The Moth, and your host for this episode.

We're going to be sharing a very special story with you today.

It's a story about survival and resilience and one child's experience in the Holocaust.

Albert Heppner told this at a Moth mainstage in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Stick around after the story for an interview with Albert, where I'll talk to him about his life after the war, what we can take away from his experiences, and so much more.

Here's Albert, live at the mall.

It's 1940.

I'm five years old.

I'm lying in bed.

It's a Wednesday night, the night my father and three of his buddies are playing cards.

And

I'm doing pretty well, sleeping, used to the noise that they make, and suddenly there's a big noise that sounds like thunder.

And

I wake up to it and I see my father jumping up to shut the lights and

close the curtains.

And he's

looking out.

And

what sounded to me like thunder was for the adults

some bombing outside of Brussels, Belgium.

And my father says Sacomance,

which means it's starting.

I suppose it was the first time that I realized

something was wrong and I felt affected by it, but

I really, I just didn't know.

I just felt terribly affected by it.

Very soon thereafter, my father dies of natural causes,

and I'm in

first grade,

and

two

Gestapo men, they wore a certain garb, that's how we all knew were Gestapo men, barged in

and the teacher asked, what

What do you want?

And they said they're here to take out three Jewish children.

This was the first grade.

I didn't really know what it meant,

but I felt a pit in my stomach.

I felt like

they were talking about me somehow.

And they called out one name, and then I was sure I was going to be called out.

And I was the third name.

Three of us were taken to the principal's office by the Gestapo.

Our mothers were waiting

in the principal's office and they were told to just take us out.

My mother, a dramatic woman, just screamed all the way going back home for about eight blocks and all I felt was

rejected, not wanted and I didn't quite understand.

And because I really didn't know what was meant by Jewish, and

she screamed all the way home recklessly really because we could have gotten picked up.

A cousin of mine, Muttle, was a doctor in a hospital in Brussels.

He came to the house where my mother and my brother and I were living and he

approached my mother and said that he had to take me away so he could hide me because things were getting very bad and

so that my mother and my brother could escape without me being a burden there.

She was holding me very tight more than ever, tighter than ever,

and he just

literally ripped me out of her arms into his.

And it wasn't so bad for me because I always loved him.

He had always been very,

very good to me.

So

I didn't understand what was going on, but I knew it was something terrible going on.

He took me

for a few blocks to a local church,

and we went in the back door, it seemed, and there we met

what turned out to be the priest,

a very so gentle man,

muttle, my cousin said to him

that I was Albert and that he said to me, just listen to this man, do whatever he says.

The priest took me by the hand and we walked a couple of stories down the sub-basement and

down a corridor and into

what seemed, I didn't realize was a door.

We walked in.

It was a room with six cots and five boys lying in the cots.

The priest put me in one of the cots and said he would tell me more the next day.

I wasn't there very long because

someone had told on the priest that he was hiding Jewish kids.

So

fortunately, Motel,

as a doctor, had been given a lot of leeway, and at the same time, he had taken advantage and become part of the underground.

So he heard from somebody in the underground that there was a raid that was going to happen at

the church.

So Mottal came, grabbed me.

We ran out the last second, literally, and he started

what turned out to be

to take me to a place where it was one of several places where I was going to be hidden.

A very nice couple, I was

with them for a few weeks, and I'd sit very often in the afternoon and look out in the street and I'd

feeling

like

why can't I belong somewhere.

And there were some children who came out of what seemed to be a Catholic school.

They were playing, they were shooting marbles on the sidewalk and I really wondered

why couldn't I be like them?

Why couldn't I be there with them?

And I really didn't understand what was going on.

But

after a while the kids, one of the kids saw me

looking at them, so he waved to me, I waved back to him, and this went on for quite a few days until an older man who knew evidently the people who were hiding me, he knew that they didn't have children.

So

I guess they told Michel and they were afraid to keep me there because somebody would talk about it.

So again I was taken away.

He took me several places until I guess he ran out of places to take me to and took me to his own apartment.

I didn't know that he had a girlfriend,

but when we walked in, this woman, Marie-Louise,

she like ran to me and grabbed me and held me

so tightly and so softly and so nicely, it was the first time that I felt like

maybe I belong here, you know.

And

she really took care of me most of the time that I was hidden with them.

And

she tried to teach me

how to tie my shoelaces.

And I was,

all the time that she was trying to teach me how to tie my shoelaces, I kept looking at her.

She was beautiful and soft and gentle and laughing.

And

it felt very good.

And she said, look over here.

And I never really looked anywhere.

And so I really never learned there to tie my shoelaces.

After

some more time there, things got worse and worse in the cities and the metropolises.

And so Muck thought that it would be better for me to be outside of Brussels where it was getting more dangerous.

So he had me sent to a convent in Namur, which was southern Belgium.

And the next day or two after I got there, a nun came over and said very

strictly,

Mother Superior wants to see you.

And so I just went with her.

I followed her to a long corridor and very sinister looking the whole thing.

And we walked in, and just the way she had been sinister, so was Mother Superior, who said very little except,

from now on your name is going to be Albert Nova.

And then she said,

you're going to be an altar boy and if anybody asks you if you're Jewish, deny it.

And again,

I really didn't...

I didn't understand because I didn't understand what Jewish was, but I knew what deny was.

I did my job as a good boy.

I became a good altar boy.

I was there for two years and

after two years at one time

one of the nuns approached me and again I'd never been in Mother Superior's office since that first time, but a nun said that Mother Superior wanted to see me again.

So I went.

But this time I walked in, she was like all smiles.

She says, oh, I have good news for you.

You're going back to Brussels and you'll see your mother and everything will be better.

I didn't know what she was talking about for sure because

I had no contact with anybody else outside of the convent.

The woman that had brought me there from the underground brought me back to Brussels.

brother came back, he had run away to Switzerland and he came back from a work camp in Switzerland.

So the three of us sort of got things settled and

things were getting better for us

at the end, nearing the end of the war.

When the war was over,

many

of the young people

who had similar situations,

we formed groups with the idea of going to Israel.

We all became Zionists right away with the hope to find a place where we wouldn't be hated,

where we wouldn't not belong.

And so often

we'd have a good time getting ready for it.

But we also started talking about some of the things that had happened to us during the war.

And here

I really felt at no time at all that

there was

whatever confidence I might have had, I lost all the confidence because I tell my story that it was hidden.

And okay, I didn't eat very much.

We starved so much because they had no food in the convent to speak of.

And that was the worst thing.

But I survived and

I sort of did okay.

And some of the other guys would talk about people they'd lost.

to the concentration camps and family they had burnt.

And so I felt like I didn't even have, I couldn't even talk with them.

I really didn't want to talk anymore.

I felt like,

again, I really didn't belong.

Whatever was happening, it didn't work for me.

Finally,

my mother and I,

her sister asked her to move to the United States, which we did.

And as time went on,

I found it easier to talk about.

I discovered

how to deal with some introspection and how to be

a better person, feeling more like I belonged to what was going on.

And I really,

then

I was able to talk about it more and ultimately

I just felt like I belonged and I wound up living like now

for 60 years in the same house which I

know is definitely related to these periods where I had been

like strawn away from one place to another and never felt very secure.

But now

I see my time in the house as a place where I do belong and where I feel we all need to have a place where we belong.

That was Albert Heppner.

We ask all of our storytellers to send us a bio to read.

This was the one he sent us.

We think it's pretty special.

82 years ago, Hitler thought I should not roam this planet.

Gentiles hid me in churches, homes, and a convent in Belgium.

I thought I had done something wrong and felt guilty my entire life.

Hitler, you failed.

I wanted to hear more from Albert about his story and about his life after the events he described.

So I sat down to talk with him.

Hi, Albert.

Thank you for coming in to do this.

My pleasure.

First, let's say today is a special day, a special anniversary.

Yes.

Yes, do you want to tell us what today is?

Today is the 73rd anniversary of my arrival to the United States from Belgium.

Dang, it's so crazy that we're doing it on this day.

Like, what serendipity?

Oh, I remember you told me, so you got moved around to, I'm wondering, like, how many places that you remember that you got moved around to, and also if there was anywhere that you liked, like anywhere that you stayed where you liked the people that you were with.

Okay, I got moved around to a couple of different churches

to

about six different homes,

people's

Gentiles' homes, and I got moved around to a farm and I got moved to a convent for two years.

The place I loved, that I liked the most,

was one apartment was a couple, a man and a woman.

He was

deaf and she was mute.

Those were my only two contacts.

I was barely, I wasn't, I was like six and a half, seven years old.

We lived on air apartment, it was on the third floor,

and

they were

they made

furniture, straw furniture.

And

in the course of my stay there, which is quite a few weeks, I learned how to make straw furniture.

They taught me how.

And

they were,

it was sign language.

I don't know that I ever learned any sign language to speak of.

I spoke and shook my head a lot and my hands and arms.

But the woman was particularly sweet, very, very charming, and very nice to me.

Her husband could have lived without me.

So it was all clear in the gestures.

And what I loved is that I did stuff.

I did things.

They showed me how to make chair furniture and

I did parts of it.

And the other thing that

wound up being a a very positive thing was

late afternoon,

I would often just sit outside at the window and I'd look out.

And there was a Catholic elementary school right across the street that was letting out.

I would guess 3 p.m.

or something like that.

And kids would be coming out and they'd play marbles.

on the sidewalk.

They'd draw

a square rectangle and they'd all play marbles and I'd look at them and I'd envy what they were doing and that I had no young people to be friendly with.

But after a while, after several days, one of the kids looked up, saw me, waved, I waved back.

and we became distant friends

and others started waving as well.

And so, you know, I enjoyed from afar.

But then it turned out to be

the tragedy was that

an elderly man, not as old as I am now, but an elderly man who was observing the kids playing, shooting marbles, noticed that the kids were waving to me.

He looked up and he knew the apartment that I was staying in.

He also knew that the couple had no children.

So as soon as the people who were keeping me discovered this, he actually, this man asked him if I was a relative from out of town that was staying with them.

And I don't know exactly what they said, but they did call my cousin, who was a doctor and also in the underground.

He's the one who had placed me there.

So they called him and told him that they were very worried that this guy would denounce me.

My favorite place.

Every other place was pretty

bad.

What happened to your cousin after the war?

Well, he ultimately,

he was one of ten doctors that were finally taken from the hospital to a concentration camp in Germany.

In Germany,

from what

we heard, our family heard about him, is that he was asked while in the camp to take care,

they would let him take care of

Jewish interned

people if he promised to take care of the soldiers as well.

He did,

and he did that until

I suppose by coincidence, until two days before the camps were liberated,

whatever happened,

we were told by the nine doctors who made it back.

He didn't make it back because he committed suicide.

He told them that he would not take care of the Germans anymore.

And so they told him that he did they started beating him up and the other doctors said that what he did is the next day he committed suicide.

And

the war essentially for that camp ended a day day later.

I'm not dramatizing it.

This is the way I was told about it.

That's so hard to hear.

I can't believe that didn't come up in our other conversations.

Sorry.

So

you said in the story, I think, and we talked a lot about how you didn't want to talk about it.

There was like a long time where you couldn't talk about it.

So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about like how did it feel to, I know it was a hard process for you to like dredge up all the.

No, it was, well, you know, you asked me a lot of difficult questions,

but the thing is, you helped me, you directed me in

hanging on to what was important, which I it felt it felt

trying.

I think it's because you dealt with some depth.

Not things that I didn't know and not really things that I didn't want to talk about, but just things that I really talked about.

And

I took it that you wanted it in a meaningful way, and I hope that's what happened.

That is what happened.

You were amazing.

Is there any other anything you feel like you have not said or wanted to say or would want included when the story airs?

Simply that I'm very glad that you folks and some other folks out there

are

having these stories somewhat reiterated

because

there are quite a few people including I've spoken to

many schools, many classes and let me tell you there are a lot of people who haven't a clue.

Thank you so much for doing this, Albert.

It's such a joy to have you in the studio and yeah your story is so important and we're just so thrilled to that you shared it with us.

Thank you for doing this.

As someone who lost family members in the Holocaust it was especially moving to talk with Albert about his experiences and we want to thank him for his generosity in sharing the story with us.

That's all for this episode.

From all of us here at the Moth, have a storyworthy week.

Michelle Jalowski is a producer and director at the Moth, where she helps people craft and shape their stories for stages all over the world.

She also directed Albert Heppner's story.

This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Janess, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Solinger.

The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Cluche, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant Walker, Leigh Ann Gulley, and Aldi Casa.

All Moth stories are true, as remembered by the storytellers.

For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

TheMoth podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.

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