'Keep the stories alive so this doesn't happen again'
SANDOWN — There were two groups of people living in Berlin when things became dangerous for Jewish people — those who fled out of fear and those who stayed, wondering how bad it could get.
When Jewish businesses began to burn and Jewish children could no longer attend school, Arnold Zweig's family fled to South America while Lanny (Lehman) Zweig's family stayed until they feared for their lives.
Eventually, both families sought refuge in Colombia, where Lanny and Arnold met, married and lived for 20 years before immigrating to Los Angeles, where their son, Milton Zweig, was born.
Lanny (Lehman) Zweig's story
Lanny was 8 years old when her father received a phone call warning him that he and his family would be burned alive if they didn't leave their apartment, which sat atop the family's dry cleaning business in what was downtown Berlin.
It was 1938, said Zweig, and the Kristallnacht had just begun.
With her parents and her grandmother by her side, Lanny hid her yellow star with a teddy bear and boarded a train that would take the family into France. From there, they were smuggled through the woods into Brussels while being shot at.
Shortly after arriving, Lanny's father was arrested for not wearing his yellow star in public and brought to Mechelen, a holding camp in the suburbs of Brussels, before he was transported to Auschwitz and murdered.
He'd write letters to his family about his time in the concentration camp, which Zweig has today, along with his yellow star and other Holocaust artifacts.
The letters were filled with positives notes about his time in the camp.
'He said everything was fine, that he was having a good time, kind of like a summer camp but it was anything but,' Zweig said.
Though Lanny and her mother were hiding out in a relative's apartment, the family decided to send Lanny away to live with another family. She changed her name, attended a Catholic school and lived as a non-Jew until she could spend the rest of the war hiding in a cellar with her mother.
'She remembered when the British liberated Brussels. She and her mother watched them come through the streets,' Zweig said. 'Shortly after that, they decided to leave and go to South America.'
Being an only child, Lanny and her mother traveled alone to Bogota, Colombia, where she would later meet Arnold, another survivor and Berlin native. The couple married and they and Lanny's mother moved to Los Angeles where Zweig was born.
'I remember going to my grandmother's apartment on the weekends,' he said. 'She would have all of her German friends that were there come to her apartment to play cards and most of the people that came there had numbers on their arms. I remember seeing that as a young child.'
Arnold Zweig's story
Arnold's mother didn't want to take the chance of staying in Berlin.
'She heard there was someone writing visas for people to leave the country so she went there and some guy wrote her a visa that turned out to be bogus but it worked anyway,' Zweig said. 'When she went home and told the family they were leaving, my father said he had no idea where that country was.'
The family, made up of Arnold, his brother and their parents, boarded a boat, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and were dropped on the shores of Cartagena, Colombia.
'It was pouring rain, they had nowhere to stay and no money. They had a few chests with all of their clothes in there,' Zweig said. 'They stayed in a hotel for a few days and slowly they found a place to live.'
The family eventually learned to speak Spanish and English, and they survived there before immigrating to the United States, where Arnold worked in insurance and Lanny was the picture of the classic homemaker, caring for the home, Arnold and their four children.
Zweig said that it was common for Europeans impacted by the Holocaust to flee to South America. After the war, a lot of Nazis sought refuge in South America, too, and were hunted down by Nazi hunters during the 1940s and 1950s.
Lanny and Arnold were married for 67 years before they died eight months apart from one another, Lanny, age 90, in 2021 and Arnold, age 97, in 2022.
'This impacted them their whole lives. There was never a time when it wasn't on their minds. It always affected them,' Zweig said.
Holocaust survivors are older, they're dying and soon, too, will their children and family members.
Tell the stories, record them, write them down, preserve them, so this doesn't happen again and so people never forget, Zweig said.
'Keep the stories alive,' he continued.
Zweig's family history, research and artifacts will soon be donated to Keene State College where they will be available for public viewing.
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