LAGUNA NIGUEL Locked in a safe is about all that remains of Walter Lachman’s youth.
A musty old cap. Unwashed and unworn in 66 years.
He removes it from a bag and lets his fingers run over the faded blue-and-gray stripes.
“It reminds me of how good things are now,” says Lachman, 81, of Laguna Niguel. “I’ve had a good life. There’s a certain sense of pride that I survived – I made it out alive.”
He last wore the cap in Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp. Nothing else of his former life survived. No childhood toys. No letters. No relatives. Not even a home to which he could return.
So at age 18, he set out for America and, with $20 in his pocket, he created a new life. He finished high school. And college. Married. Had two children. Started a business. Grew old and happy and rarely looked back.
Until one day recently, when his phone rang. A voice asked if he was related to a man named “Wolfgang Lachmann.”
“That’s me!” said Lachman, explaining that he changed his name on arriving here in 1946.
Well, someone in Berlin is looking for you, the voice said. They found something of yours that they want to return.
DEATH AND LIBERATION
Lachman was 5 when Hitler took power.
As a Jewish boy in Berlin, he had to turn in his bike and his dog. Jews couldn’t subscribe to newspapers. Couldn’t shop at certain hours. Couldn’t ride in streetcars.
In 1938 came Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were ransacked and synagogues burned. In 1941, came the yellow stars Jews had to sew onto their clothes. In 1942, came the trains to take them away.
By then, Lachman’s mom had died of leukemia and his dad of tuberculosis. So he boarded a freight car with his gramma. For seven days in January they rode – with no room to lie down. Their toilet for 50 was a bucket, dumped once a day. And the weather grew colder and colder.
“It was the first time I ever saw a person die,” Lachman recalls.
And not the last.
They were shipped to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, where his gramma disappeared, never to be seen again. Then to Kaiserwald, a work camp where he repaired German uniforms. Then to Bergen-Belsen as the war wound down.
When British troops liberated the camp in 1945, they found 13,000 unburied dead scattered like leaves throughout the camp.
“All of a sudden, we were free,” says Lachman. “But we were too weak to get up, too weak to celebrate.”
Another 32,000 would die of typhus and the results of malnutrition over the next month. But Lachman survived.
A year later, he arrived in New York with the clothes on his back – and the striped cap that saw him through two years of German concentration camps.
“MY DEAR WOLFGANG”
Last October, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that several Berlin librarians had uncovered a dirty little secret.
Scattered among their library shelves were thousands of books looted from Jewish homes during WWII. For decades, no one paid much attention.
But some, like Dr. Annette Gerlach, in charge of historical collections at Berlin’s Central and Regional Library, felt it was time to come clean.
“It is a very important question of our history,” she says. “We are not allowed to close our eyes to our history.”
The article explained that up to 1 million Jewish books had been looted. And the Berlin library had purchased more than 40,000 of them, marked as “gifts.”
It was this article that Rabbi Larry Seidman, of Irvine, read with interest recently. And it was this part that stopped him cold:
One of the looted books had a handwritten dedication: “For my dear Wolfgang Lachmann, in friendship, Chanukah 5698, December 1937.”
Seidman knew someone with a very similar name. Could it be?
A GOOD LIFE
Yes.
Lachman was given the book, “For Our Youth: A Book of Entertainment for Israelite Boys and Girls,” by a teacher at school.
It’s just a child’s activity book – not some priceless piece of art. But to Lachman, it’s a missing-link to his past.
“I have nothing else,” he says, holding his concentration camp cap and an old photograph that a relative gave him.
He and his wife, Jean, were scheduled to fly back to receive the book this week, but she fell, fracturing her skull.
Go by yourself, she told him from her hospital bed. I want you to go.
But he couldn’t leave her side – so he sent one of their daughters.
“I hope I’m able to hold myself together,” says Deborah Valdez, of Malibu – who will accept the book during a library ceremony Monday. “My father went through so much and created such a beautiful life. I just want to do him proud.”
The book has been part of a library exhibit for the last six months detailing the looted books. It’s a reminder, Gerlach says, of injustices done.
It’s also a reminder of one thing the Nazis couldn’t take away from Walter Lachman – a spirit that drove him to survive and start a new life in America.
“It’s symbolic of something really special and sweet,” Lachman says. “It’s symbolic of my mother and my father and our life that was good.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-6979 or tberg@ocregister.com
