(Ernst) Wolfgang Stein was born in Schweinfurt on August 4, 1929 as a son of the entrepreneur Dr. Fritz Stein and his wife Ruth, née Kantoworicz. His father and his brother Jakob were the co-owners and directors general of “Basaltstein GmbH Schweinfurt”, a company to which numerous basalt works in the Rhön hills and in Switzerland belonged.

He lived in Bad Kissingen together with his parents in the summer months of 1930 and 1931 between May and September or August respectively. Why the family lived in Bad Kissingen during the spa season is not known. In the registration card of Bad Kissingen, there is an entry saying that Fritz Stein lived with his wife and child in “Villa Julia” in Schönbornstrasse 19 and that he himself drove to his business to Schweinfurt every day. In the autumn of 1931, the family moved back to Schweinfurt permanently, where the Steins lived in a stately three-storey house in Schultestraße, which Wolfgang's grandfather Adolf had built with stones from his basalt mines. The company's business premises were on the first floor, Adolf Stein's apartment with 10-15 rooms was above, and Fritz Stein and his brother Jakob and their families lived on the upper floor. After the death of his grandfather, Wolfgang's father and his uncle Jakob took over the management of the company in 1932.

After the death of the grandfather, Wolfgang’s father and his uncle Jakob took on the management of the business. Together with his younger brothers Heinz Thomas (*1931) and Uriel Adolf Michael (*1935), Wolfgang surely grew up in a protected family environment and certainly, at first, in privileged circumstances, but soon felt the exclusion and growing anti-Semitism after the National Socialists came to power. As early as 1933, he was expelled from kindergarten and lost his playmates. From one day to the next, his non-Jewish friend Erika was also no longer allowed to play with him because her father, who was a member of the NSDAP, had forbidden her to do so. From then on, he could only play with his siblings and cousins in the huge garden of the Stein villa and felt quite lonely (see USC Shoa Foundation, Visual History Archive, Interview Wolf Stein. We owe much of the following information to this interview).

Wolfgang Stein remembers that the NSDAP had already hired people to come to the front of their house in 1933 and shout "Jews out" and "Saujuden". The increasing persecution and discrimination of the National Socialists threatened the existence of the Jewish family enterprise more and more. In spring 1936, Wolfgang’s father and his uncle were arrested at the Swiss border on the flimsy pretext of smuggling foreign currencies and lost the right to represent their enterprise. When Gestapo carried out further investigations afterwards, the allegations weren’t found to be true. The incident made Fritz Stein move to Hamburg with his family in May 1936, where he had found a job and the situation seemed less dangerous than in Schweinfurt. Wolfgang attended a Jewish Talmud-Thora school here for about a year. He also experienced violent attacks in Hamburg: a group of young people chased him on his way home, threw stones at him and shouted "bloody, ugly Jew" after him (ibid.).

Wolfgang’s parents disagreed where they should go in the long term. His father, who was a convinced Zionist, would have liked to emigrate to Palestine, where two younger siblings had already emigrated in 1931. He toyed with the idea of setting up an industrial company on the Dead Sea. His mother, on the other hand, found life in Palestine less attractive for a woman. And so they visited Palestine in 1936 to get a first-hand impression. They then decided against emigrating to Palestine and emigrated to Amsterdam in September 1937. There, Ruth's uncle Meno Lissauer owned a company ("Metals and Minerals Association") that imported/exported metals and minerals, where Fritz Stein found employment. Over the next few years, the Stein family lived in quite secure financial circumstances, and in the summer months they even spent family vacations together on the North Sea coast in Zandvoort.

But with the invasion of the German troops, the situation for the family became precarious again. When the German Wehrmacht invaded Holland on 10 May 1940, it became clear how differently Wolfgang's parents reacted in such exceptional situations. The Dutch authorities had imposed a curfew on all Germans and Fritz Stein, who was always law-abiding and compliant, hesitated to do anything. Ruth, on the other hand, considered it necessary to flee to England immediately. On the 13th or 14th, Ruth finally persuaded her husband to flee from their flat towards the coast and take a ferry to England. They had organised a car and the closer they got to the coast, the more intense the bombing by German planes became. When a roadblock a few kilometres from the coast made it impossible to continue their journey, they tried to reach the ferry on foot with their children. However, Dutch soldiers finally made it clear to them that their endeavour was outright suicide in the face of the German bombardment. As a result, they returned to their flat in Amsterdam on 15 May, the day of the Dutch surrender (USC Shoa Foundation, Visual History Archive, interview with Heinz Thomas Stein).

At first, life seemed to go on as normal, but with the German occupation, new restrictions and bans were constantly being imposed on Jewish citizens: they had to wear the Jewish star in public, were no longer allowed to visit public parks, had to hand in their bicycles, cars and radios and were no longer allowed to use public transport. Jews were also banned from going out between 8 pm and 6 am. Wolfgang and his brother Heinz Thomas had to leave public school and go to a Jewish school. According to Heinz Thomas, Anne Frank also attended this school and was in his older brother Wolfgang's class. Gradually, more and more Jewish acquaintances disappeared, either because they went into hiding with the help of the Dutch underground organisation or because they were picked up and deported by the Germans. This and the suicides among his acquaintances after the German invasion frightened and disturbed the sensitive ten-year-old Wolfgang more and more. One evening, as his mother was putting him to bed, he implored her to let him live if she would commit suicide. (ibid.).

The Stein family were able to stay in their home until mid-1943, as they were one of the few Jewish families to be spared deportation up to this point. However, as the German raids became more frequent, the pressure on the parents to do something grew. Once again, Wolfgang's parents had different opinions. Fritz Stein, always used to behaving in accordance with the law, actually considered volunteering for "one of the better" camps, under the illusion that he and his family would be spared and treated better there because of his merits and decorations as a front-line fighter in the First World War. Ruth objected vehemently and said that he was no longer in his right mind. Fritz Stein believed that his plan would keep the family together, which was his top priority, but Ruth replied that surviving was more important than staying together (ibid.).

In the summer of 1943, they were warned by an acquaintance in the middle of the night. He said they had to leave the house immediately, otherwise they would be arrested the next day. They managed to leave their house unnoticed and go into hiding for a few days in the former offices of the company where Wolfgang's father had worked. As they were likely to be picked up every day, Dutch helpers took them to a second apartment, where they stayed until September. Fritz Stein was finally dissuaded by his wife and also by the Dutch helpers of the underground movement from his absurd idea of voluntarily going into a camp and agreed to split up the family.

Wolfgang and his two siblings were gradually taken into hiding in the countryside by members of the Dutch underground movement: his youngest brother Michael came to live with a Christian family in Nijmwegen and survived the war there, Heinz Thomas found shelter with a Catholic farming family in Swolgen near Limburg in southern Holland. (He describes his spectacular survival story in the above-mentioned Shoa Foundation interview). Wolfgang Stein was brought to the east of the Netherlands by members of the Dutch underground helpers; he was supported by a whole network of helpers; he was accommodated in a total of six different places until he arrived at his final hiding place in Sassenheim.

In February 1944, the then 14-year-old Wolfgang Stein was betrayed: In the early hours of the morning, two Dutch policemen turned up and, armed with pistols, forced their way into the apartment so quickly that escape was no longer possible. One of the two policemen was known to Wolfgang. He had occasionally brought them illegal newspapers and obviously betrayed them. Wolfgang Stein was initially imprisoned in Amsterdam and two weeks later was driven to the train station by a Dutch SS unit in a black uniform with a skull and crossbones and deported from there to the Westerbork collection camp (see Stein, Wolf. Interview 7400. Interview by Sauci Bosner. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, December 05, 1995).

It was a happy coincidence, that Helga, an acquaintance of the family, worked in the camp registry and held a protective hand over him. Although she was ultimately unable to prevent his deportation, she was at least able to prevent him from being placed on the Auschwitz transport list, which would have meant a certain death sentence for him. At the beginning of March 1944, he was deported to Bergen-Belsen, where his parents were already, as he had learnt from a former Amsterdam teacher in Westerbork. After a few days, he managed to make contact with his parents. The fact that all three survived the hardships of the camp was nothing short of a miracle. Wolfgang in particular fell seriously ill several times and spent 10 to 11 months of the total 14 months in Bergen-Belsen in the infirmary barracks. He first contracted diphtheria and survived the disease because a doctor was able to give him the last dose of an antiserum that he had brought with him to the camp. He then contracted hepatitis and various types of typhoid fever. When he left the sick barracks at the beginning of March 1945, the mass deaths in the camp were at their peak. The shocking images of the piles of corpses were to be indelibly imprinted on Wolfgang's memory (cf. ibid.).

 Like miracle, they were able to endure the hardships in the camp and experienced the liberation by the Red Army in April 1945. When British troops approached the concentration camp in the last weeks of the war, about 6,800 prisoners were selected for being transported to Theresienstadt on three transport trains. The last of those three trains, the so-called “Lost Train” or “Train of the Lost Ones”, however, didn’t reach its destination and ended up in Tröbitz in Brandenburg after an odyssey through still un-occupied Germany. During the journey, 198 people died: Some were killed by machinegun fire and bombs from low-flying planes, others died of diseases and hunger. Underway, an epidemic of spot typhus had broken out because of the terrible hygienic conditions, which was a death sentence for many of the weakened prisoners. The train had to stop again and again in order to unload the dead bodies and inter them next to the railway line. On April 20 or 21, 1945 respectively, the train arrived at Tröbitz between Torgau and Cottbus. The bridge crossing the Elster had been blown up, which caused the train to stop. On the morning of April 23, 1945, soldiers of the Red Army freed the surviving passengers who were lying among the dead bodies in many of the wagons. For the Steins it meant salvage, 320 other prisoners, however, were beyond help. They died in the following weeks from the effects of the typhus epidemic and the transport (See: Wikipedia article “Verlorener Zug” hinted at by H.-J. Beck).

Ernst Wolfgang Stein had also been infected, but survived the disease very weakly. The Stein family was able to return to the Netherlands in June 1945. Wolfgang's younger siblings also survived, Heinz Thomas had successfully gone into hiding until the end of the war and Michael, who was separated from his parents, had hidden near Nijmegen and experienced the liberation as a ten-year-old.
Over the next few years, the family lived together in Amsterdam. Photos from Ruth Stein's estate show Wolfgang and his siblings making music together in their Amsterdam apartment with Aunt Lilo, Ruth's younger sister, who had emigrated to the United States and later became a famous violinist there.
Wolfgang attended grammar school in Amsterdam and was a member of the Jewish Youth Association. He suffered from the effects of tuberculosis for a long time, which is why his parents sent him to the "Lyceum Alpinum" in Zuoz in the Swiss Engadine to recuperate.

I n an interview with the Shoa Foundation in 1995, Wolfgang Stein gives a very personal insight into the traumatic consequences that life in the underground, but above all the terrible experiences and impressions of Bergen-Belsen, had on the rest of his life: "I had no mental energy and was exhausted. My mind was exhausted. Father was deeply disappointed by my lack of commitment at school. He didn't understand that I was for many years more than exhausted. There was no inner power in my mind. There was enough power in my body and I was recovering slowly. But I had no energy to stand behind any idea. My whole life after the war was overshadowed by [my traumatic experiences]. I could not concentrate. After school, I spent two years in Switzerland in a paradise in the mountains, had a nice time mountaineering and learning the beauty of the mountains. But then I came back and didn't know what to do. I wanted to study. What study? ... So I studied medicine, but I couldn't get come through. So my studies lasted endless. And finally, I was almost towards the end of my physicians examination, but on the way to the exam I returned and said I couldn't take it" (ibid.). A second attempt to take the final examination also failed, although his professors talked him down and thought he was intelligent. For decades, Wolfgang Stein was dependent on the regular compensation payments for victims of the Nazi regime.

Wolfgang Stein also suffered emotionally for a long time from the consequences of his experiences during the Nazi era: "So I got into a psychotherapy, but that didn't help, and many psychotherapists - nobody understood in those days what had happened. My intellectual development took place, but my emotional development completely stagnated. There was no development in relationships with all the implications [...] For years I couldn't speak about my experiences [...]" He was also unable to build long-term relationships with women. He explains this with a behaviour that he had developed in the concentration camp in order to survive. "To survive, you have to develop survival strategies. One of the strategies I developed was: 'Do not feel! No emotions!' This plays a role my whole life after the war, that I could not tolerate emotions. My life was spoiled in that aspect. This took on for decades. I was a survivor. I had no right to live. Why did all those people die and I survived? There are two sides of the coin: I wanted to survive, but having survived, I felt for a long period that I had no right to do so" (ibid.). Wolfgang Stein suffered from these feelings of guilt, which are typical of many Shoah survivors, for a long time; this interview from 1995 was certainly also a step towards coming to terms with his traumatic experiences.

Ernst Wolfgang Stein had been living in a Jewish retirement home in Amsterdam since 2011 (information from Dr Ariane Zwiers, Joods Cultureel Kwartier, Amsterdam). He died in March 2020 at the age of 90.

Wolfgang's father Fritz died in Lugano in December 1956, his mother lived almost four decades longer and died in Jerusalem in October 1993. His brother Heinz Thomas, born in 1931, who called himself Tom after emigrating to the USA, became a psychiatrist in San Francisco, where he died in 2014, and Michael, Wolfgang's youngest brother, worked as a Middle East correspondent for NRC Handelsblad. He died in Amsterdam in 2009.

From the photo album:

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