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t was the longest walk of my life, says Andrew
Sternberg. Despite the balmy, summer night, there
was a chill in my heart.The date was June 23, 1945.
At age 16, Sternberg had just been liberated from the
Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.
During the previous year, the lanky, tow-headed
youth had been interred in four camps: first,
Auschwitz; then, a few weeks later, Mauthausen,
Melk, and, finally, Ebensee. Sternbergs parents and
grandparents disappeared from a selection line when
the family arrived in Auschwitz, and Sternberg never
saw them again.
Now, he was on his way home. It was 2 a.m. when
he debarked at the train station in Nagykanizsa,
Hungary, Sternberg recalls.
Suddenly it hit me: Im free! But the closer he
walked to his former residence, the slower his pace.
As a kid, I always made the trip from the station
to my house in 25 minutes. This time, it took me
four hours. I didnt want to face the raw fact that my
family had been murdered.
He found his parents house was still standing, but it
had been converted into a bakery by the Russians. In
the backyard, Sternberg discovered the familys veg-
etable garden still flourishing. Exhausted, the youth fell
asleep on a bench under a walnut tree in his backyard.
The next morning, he was awakened by voices.
It was my Catholic neighbor, Sternberg remem-
bers. She had a glass of milk in her hand for me and
she called, Is that you, Bandi (Andy)? Where is your
family?
Inwardly, Sternberg raged at her question. I said to
myself, How can you ask me where they are? You
should know! And I promised myself I would tell the
world what happened.
Fast-forward 50 years to March, 1995.
Andrew Sternberg is sitting in the wood-paneled
library of his Shaker Heights residence, surrounded
by hundreds of books in Hungarian and English,
most of them devoted to the Holocaust. In the past
half-century, he has acquired an encyclopedic knowl-
edge of the topic. He can quote dozens of historians
and hundreds of statistics from memory, and he speaks
passionately about the topic, publicly and privately.
Sternberg has lectured on the Holocaust to high
school groups throughout Cleveland, escorted family
and friends back to Austrian concentration camps,
and was an articulate courtroom observer during the
1981 Cleveland hearings for alleged Nazi death-camp
guard John Demjanjuk.
But has he ever been able to exorcise the memories
of Auschwitz, or the moment he realized that his
family had, literally, vanished into smoke there?
I feel I was cheated out of a life, replies
Sternberg. Im still searching. I often feel like a tree
with part of its limbs missing.
His most painful memory, he says, occurred four
years after he was liberated. Sternberg had joined the
Hungarian army after the communists had taken over
his country.
After three months of basic training, Sternberg
earned a coveted 48-hour pass. I was standing at the
railroad station, and suddenly I realized I had no
place to go. Everyone else had a destination. But I had
no home and nobody waiting for me to arrive.
The revelation hit hard. After four years of strug-
gling to survive, Sternberg considered taking his life
by throwing himself under an approaching train.
What kept him going, Sternberg says, is an almost
animalistic instinct for survival he developed in the
camps and a grim determination to thwart the origi-
nal intent of the Nazis.
Later, he discovered that an aunt had survived the
Holocaust, and he moved to Budapest to live with
her. If you become an intellectual (a poet or
philosopher) or a doctor or lawyer and decide to
move to another country, his relative counseled him,
youre liable to end up washing dishes.
Sternberg took her advice and began an apprentice-
ship in Budapest to become a plumber and sheet-
metal worker. Since he was sent to Auschwitz in his
teens, he had completed only eight years of formal
education.
I could have continued at school, he says, but
students had to live in dormitories. They reminded
I
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me of the barracks in the concentration camps, and I
knew Id feel like a prisoner again.
Instead, Sternberg continued his education infor-
mally among the writers and philosophers who fre-
quented the sidewalk cafes of Budapest in the mid-
1950s. He became friendly with some of the leading
intellectuals of the day, many of them Jewish.
Often, they were 15 or 20 years his senior.
I was always looking for a father figure, he
reflects.
During this period, he married a schoolteacher
from the Hungarian town of Esztergom. Sternberg
developed a voracious appetite for books, magazines,
and knowledge of every kind: Judaism, politics, eco-
nomics, he emphasizes, gesturing to the books
crammed on the shelves of his library. I craved knowl-
edge like a man who has had no water for a week.
In 1956, Hungary launched its shortlived uprising
against the communists. Taking advantage of the
chaos that erupted during that period, Sternberg, his
wife, and 2-year-old son hitched a ride on a truck and
headed for the Austrian border.
Carrying a laundry basket that held their son, the cou-
ple crawled through an opening in a barbed-wire fence.
We didnt know if we were in Hungary or
Austria, he remembers, because the fences and fields
twisted and looped backed on themselves.
To their dismay, they learned they were still in
Hungary when they were arrested by border guards
who held them captive. Sternberg was able to protect
his family from harm because he told the guards
about the revolution in Budapest, and convinced them
not to take any action they would later regret.
Later that evening, the revolutionary forces seized
control of Hungary, and the borders were opened.
The family crossed to Austria on foot, and two days
later, they were on a truck bound for Vienna.
It was a brief window of opportunity. Four days
later, Russian troops invaded Hungary, permanently
closing the borders and demolishing the new government.
Upon arriving in Vienna, Sternberg was befriended
by owners of a lumber company who offered him a
job, good pay and a chance to rise in the company.
But Sternberg was determined to make his way to
the United States. I really believed the streets there
were still paved with gold, he says, smiling.
An influential man he had befriended in Budapest
helped Sternberg cut through layers of red tape and
apply for a U.S. visa and green card.
On Dec. 5, 1956, the Sternbergs arrived in New
York City as part of an International Rescue
Committee program.
The HIAS staff in New York suggested that
Sternberg start his new life in Cleveland. Two weeks
later, the family arrived at Hopkins airport and were
met by representatives of the Jewish Family Service
Association. They were the first Hungarian Jewish
refugees to arrive following the end of World War II.
The family set up housekeeping on E. 140th St., but
the transition to the U.S. was not easy. Sternberg
missed the excitement and intellectual life of Budapest.
If I had the money, I would have gone back . . . . I
felt like I was a tree that was taken from its roots. You
try to transplant it, but the soil isnt accepting.
Sternberg found a job working for Union Sheet
Metals, remaining there for four years before starting
his own company, Meteor Heating and Air Condition-
ing. He began the business with $800 in savings and a
$400 loan. Every day he drove up and down streets in
Cleveland Heights, knocking on doors and asking to
repair downspouts or gutters. His average income was
$30 a day. Until eight years ago, I was still getting up
at 2 a.m. to answer service calls, he says.
Now his company is prospering. But, at age 65,
Sternberg still works 12 to 14 hours a day. His motive
is no longer financial gain. I always have to keep busy
and have people around me. Otherwise, the bad mem-
ories come back again, he observes painfully.
Sternberg has never sought reparation payments
from Germany. They cant pay me for my pain. Its
blood money, and I dont want any part of it, he asserts.
His son, Sandor, whom he smuggled across the
Austrian border, is an attorney in Cleveland. Two
daughters were born in America: Fran, who attended
the Sorbonne, and Patricia, who manages interna-
tional investments for a Danish company. This spring,
Sternberg will revisit Mauthausen to honor the libera-
tors who released him and thousands of others from
concentration camps.
This is the last big event for survivors emphasizes
Sternberg, who returned to the camp 10 years ago to
commemorate the 40th anniversary of the liberation.
Before long, there wont be any of us left to pay tribute.
Sternberg is particularly concerned that non-Jews
absorb the message of the Holocaust. Five million
people were murdered who werent Jewish. They were
French, Danish, Italians, Greek, Russians, Poles and
Norwegians. Twenty-seven nationalities in all, he
declares. It can happen anywhere when a government
starts taking away individual rights.
Take a look at whats happening in Bosnia or
Rwanda before you decide its too long ago to matter.
This story appeared first in the Cleveland Jewish News,
March 10, 1995, and is reprinted here with permission.