Survivor tells story of life in hiding
Neighbor of Anne Frank tells students how he survived the Holocaust
BY TOM CAIAZZA
Staff Writer

EDISON - Looking back on it now, it was a lie that saved Jerry von Halle's life.

It was not enough to save his brother, or his father later on. But it saved his life, sure enough.

The irony of it is, he lied about slowly dying.

In the spring of 1941, von Halle, a German Jew, then a college student living with his family and studying in Amsterdam, was arrested and dragged from his home along with his older brother by a pair of Gestapo officers. He and his brother were put in the basement of Gestapo headquarters with more than 200 other young Jews.

The Gestapo commander asked if any of the boys had a contagious disease. At his brother's urging, von Halle raised his hand. It was a lie that would save his life.

The Holocaust survivor told students at Herbert Hoover Middle School in Edison how lying to the Gestapo about having tuberculosis set in motion a chain of near captures and lucky acquaintances that would conspire to bring von Halle and his mother safely through the Holocaust.

The presentation was the culmination of a three-week, intensive study of the Holocaust that Herbert Hoover's eighth-grade classes conducted. Along with von Halle, Herbert Hoover faculty member Greta Polonitza sang a song in Yiddish and English written by Mordecai Gebirtig, a victim of the Krakow Ghetto.

The song "S'brent" literally means "It's burning," and is a call to arms for all Jews to not go quietly into the night, and "put out the fires" that threatened them.

Polonitza's rendition of the "S'brent" prompted von Halle to say he wish he had been the one singing it.

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The von Halle family was a moderately wealthy family from Hamburg, Germany, when Adolph Hitler came into power in 1933. Hitler, von Halle said, made clear to Jews in Germany what his intentions were, and von Halle's father, fearing the worst, moved the family to Amsterdam where they lived comfortably for seven years right next door to another famous figure of the Holocaust, Anne Frank.

Von Halle described Frank as a "skinny" girl and said that she, seven years his junior, and her sister were not friends with the von Halle boys.

"If she walked in I would have walked out," von Halle said if Frank were hypothetically in attendance. "Poor little Anne was not my best friend."

One day, von Halle noticed that the Frank family was no longer living in the house next door. He said that meant one of two things: they had been arrested or they were in hiding. It would be the latter that von Halle would eventually have in common with Anne Frank.

The lie von Halle told about his "illness" eventually earned him a release from the work camp where he and his brother had been held in Holland. His brother was left behind.

"He was the best friend I ever had, even now," von Halle said. "I did something I had never done before. I knew that I would never see him again, so I looked him in the eye, I hugged him and I kissed him, and we said goodbye."

Later, von Halle would learn that his brother, along with almost two-thirds of the other boys he had been with in the work camp, had "died of pneumonia."

"Do you believe that?" von Halle asked the audience. "Is that believable? Hell, no. They were killed in the most ferocious manner."

He hitchhiked his way back to Amsterdam, contacted his mother and father and made a fateful call to his former professor, a man he would later learn was part of the Dutch underground resistance against the Nazis.

The professor gave the von Halles their first of many hiding places.

After several weeks hiding in his professor's apartment, von Halle, his mother and his father, were sent to a farm in southern Holland owned by a Jewish sympathizer.

There they stayed until one day when four Nazi soldiers raided the house, stealing whatever goods they could find. Von Halle's mother hid in a closet that was remarkably left unchecked, and von Halle himself hid in a bathroom. His father, hiding in the attic, was discovered and removed. They never saw him again.

The pair left the farmhouse in the middle of the night and traveled into the woods, hoping to find a train station that would not be swarming with Nazis. They were lucky enough to find a train that took them, of all places, back to Amsterdam. Von Halle did the only thing he could do, call his former professor.

"He told me to come on over," von Halle said.

Von Halle and his mother lived with the professor and his family for two and half years, never daring to step back out into the street for fear of being captured.

One night while in hiding, von Halle was told to don a pair of headphones and write down whatever messages came in over the radio.

The one message that could be deciphered through the garbled mess was "the green cow jumped over the fence."

Perplexed, von Halle asked what it meant. It was the final confirmation date for the Allied invasion of Normandy.

When the war was over, von Halle and his mother were able to venture out into the street. Amsterdam was liberated not by the Americans, but by Canadian members of the Allied Forces. When von Halle saw the first Allied soldier in the streets of Amsterdam, he ran over to him and was greeted by something he did not expect.

The soldier, a Canadian, wore a patch on his uniform that read: Jewish Brigade Palestine.

It was then that von Halle did something he had not done throughout the entirety of the Holocaust. Through hardship and fear, loss of family and dignity, von Halle had never cried.

"When I saw this man in a uniform with a Jewish star," von Halle said, "I just broke down."

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When the war was over, von Halle came to America on a Dutch troop carrier picking up replacements for Dutch merchant marine boats that were lost in the war. He was 23 years old. He spoke no English, had $5 in his pocket and lived in a refugee facility on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

He never learned why his life was spared when the Nazis learned of his feigned illness nor why his brother didn't raise his hand as well.

He has a theory for why his brother told him to raise his hand though, and it has to do with a brother protecting a brother.

When asked how he kept going after all he had been through, von Halle, like most people who have dealt with atrocity and survived, said he simply decided to live.

"When you get to that stage of your life, you have to make a decision," von Halle said. "Will I have my life ruined or will I make the most of my life."

Gerd "Jerry" von Halle's story was recently recorded by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation program that records the stories of Holocaust survivors from their own mouths before they are lost to history.

Von Halle was asked what advice he would give to young people, and his answer was not much different than Mordecai Gebirtig's verse sung by Greta Polonitza.

"There are lots of things in today's surroundings that look terrible. Look at Africa," von Halle said. "You should do whatever you can. If there are organizations that allow to do good things, do it."

As Polonitza sang: "Steht nisht bridarlah, leshed dus faier."

"Don't stand there, my brothers, put out the fire."