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Last of three parts

Surviving the violent November 1938 Kristallnacht riots, 10-year-old Liesel Stern, and her cousin Werner Ganz left Aachen, Germany, under cover of night. Smuggled into Holland by family friends and given temporary Dutch status, they were taken to the Amsterdam apartment of Max Stern's sister, Frieda Reiss.

With their youngest daughter temporarily out of harm's way, Max and Minna Stern hastened to tie up their affairs in Aachen, and ensure the safety of their older daughter Lotte, who was living 335 miles away in Berlin.

Strong-willed and talented, 17-year-old Lotte carried a false birth certificate stating she was Catholic. She attended art school in the country's capital. She was also extremely deaf — a liability in Germany no matter religion or race. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 275,000 adults and children "deemed unworthy of life" by the Nazis were "murdered because of their disabilities."

Lotte may not have heard the Berlin riots: the sounds of destruction, the shattering of glass, the vicious plunder. But stunned, she saw SA (Assault Division) soldiers and Hitler Youth troops—wearing civilian clothes—break into Jewish-owned businesses, ransack merchandise, paint anti-Semitic slogans on storefronts, and beat terrified shop owners. Lip-reading as thugs screamed "Jude" — Jew — she knew it was only a matter of time before she'd be discovered.

"As soon as she could, my sister walked to the railroad station and bought a second-class ticket to Aachen," Ogden resident Liesel Shineberg, née Stern, recalls in her memoirs. "She was sitting in a window seat when she felt someone — a Nazi army officer in full uniform — next to her. Fortunately for Lotte, he did not realize she was deaf. As he chatted looking directly at her, she nodded and smiled. When he got off the train at the next station, she heaved a long sigh of relief."

The morning of Lotte's arrival, the Sterns were given 12 hours to leave their home or be arrested. They were required to donate their valuables to the Third Reich, relinquish their family textile mill to the state, and walk to the border with whatever they could carry.

Carrying two suitcases each, the Sterns reached the Dutch border town of Vaals. Examined and identified as Jews, although Max folded the passports to obscure the large "J" emblazoned on the page, they were allowed in.

By 1939, more than 30,000 refugees inundated the Netherlands. Detention centers were created from old bases. The Sterns were sent to an abandoned army post in The Hague.

"The barracks had to be cleaned and disinfected," Shineberg wrote. "Everyone filled mattress sacks with straw and suspended curtains from the ceiling although privacy was rare and noise constant."

Liesel waited three months before seeing her family.

"I will never forget," she wrote. "My parents and Lotte were standing behind a barbed wire fence waiting for us. Mother was thin and harried looking. Yet with everything that had been lost, she brought me a piece of my past: a favorite doll I had been given as a Chanukah present."

When Reiss found an apartment for the Sterns, they were released from detention.

Lotte worked. Liesel took English lessons. One day, a tiny box held together by rubber bands mysteriously arrived at the Stern home containing several pieces of Minna's jewelry—"we never knew who sent it"—and Newton Stern called with good news.

Onboard the S.S. Volendum, the Sterns sailed to America with the Ganzses. Liesel tasted shredded wheat for the first time and the world she knew began to change again, this time for the better.

Eileen Hallet Stone, author of "Hidden History of Utah," a compilation of her Salt Lake Tribune Living History columns, may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com. —

The whole story

For Part One of Liesel Shineberg's story, go to http://bit.ly/1EheWfu. Part Two can be found at http://bit.ly/1DwimvK.