DETROIT – Great men aren’t always physically impressive. Once, years ago, a short, cheerful older man with an almost perpetual toothy smile stopped by my Wayne State University office to say hello, and drolly offer an outrageous pun or two.
We laughed, and he took off. “Does that old guy work for the university?” a student asked. “I see him all the time in the hall.”
“That guy,” I told him, “was an intelligence agent and a hero of World War II, a survivor of the Holocaust, and one of the top scholars of German literature in the world. He used to be the provost of this university and is one of the best teachers there is.”
The student stared at me and asked, “What’s the guy’s name?
“Guy,” I said. But before I risked a remake of “who’s on first,” I added, “Stern. Guy Stern, and your assignment is to look him up.
He did. Two days later, he said “I can’t believe everything he did!” I nodded. Guy Stern, whose original name was Gunther, was for me a living testament to the fact that people don’t have to be destroyed, or even made bitter, by the worst mankind can do.
Though he wasn’t always recognized on campus, or in Detroit, he was world-famous. Sadly, he died this month on Pearl Harbor day, just a few weeks short of what would have been his 102nd birthday.
Yet he won’t soon be forgotten. If you watch Ken Burns’ recent documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, nobody is on screen more than Guy Stern. When I walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a few years ago, there his image was, calmly telling his story on the giant screen. It wasn’t a story easy to forget.
Little Gunther Stern’s parents managed to get him sent from their home in northern Germany to America when he was 15, to live with an uncle who was an unemployed baker in St. Louis. The plan was for his parents, brother and sister to join him, and it almost happened. He found a sponsor who would make it possible.
But anti-Semitism and an incompetent lawyer doomed them. Meanwhile, Gunther had become Guy (“I had a girl friend who couldn’t pronounce my name,” he told me. She didn’t last, but the name did. ) The first time I asked what he did in the war, he told me he was Marlene Dietrich’s driver when she entertained the troops.
True enough. But for a long time he didn’t talk much about his real mission: He was recruited to join the “Ritchie boys,” a top secret military intelligence program in which hundreds of American GIs, who were native German-speakers, interviewed captured Nazis, who were often meant to think their interviewers were on their side.
His ability to conceal his emotions resulted in significant information, including helping to solve the murders of two other Ritchie boys. Guy was awarded a Bronze Star for his intelligence work, which stayed largely secret for decades. Later, he received many international honors, including being made a knight of the French Legion d’Honneur. Late in the war, he made it to his hometown of Hildesheim, which was largely rubble.
While looking for his family, he met someone who told him they’d been deported to the Warsaw ghetto. That meant a horrible death there or in Auschwitz; he never learned exactly how they died. When the war was over, he decided to become a professor and devote his career to German literature. Guy told me friends asked how in the world he could do such a thing after what the Nazis had done.
Simple, he said. “I told them I wouldn’t give the Nazis the power to take my language away from me.”
Stern earned a doctorate at Colombia, and went on to a distinguished academic career, inventing a discipline called exile studies. Fourteen years ago, he was asked to become director of Michigan’s huge Zekelman Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. He hesitated, then agreed.
“After all, I’m only 87,” he said.
He had his share of sorrows even after the war; an early marriage ended in divorce; his only son and his second wife died long before he did. But in 2006, while he was speaking in Europe, a young Polish-German woman named Susanna Piontek met him, converted to Judaism, and they married. “I have a wife who is half my age and twice as smart,” he told me several times.
When I heard he had died, I assumed he’d be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But he chose instead to have a military funeral at Michigan’s Great Lakes National Cemetery.
That was totally appropriate. Guy Stern may have been culturally German, but he was American to his core. I was lucky to know him. And this country and humanity were lucky to have him.
I can’t think of a better epitaph than that.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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