Joseph Berger shared his story during the Philip N. Backstrom Jr. Survivor Lecture as part of Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week at Northeastern.
By the time Joseph Berger was 10 he had already experienced more than any child should.
Berger, a Hungarian Jew, had survived being bombed by the Germans in Belgrade and the inhumanity of the concentration camp in Bergen Belsen. He and his family had fled almost a half-dozen countries, and he had learned almost as many languages. He had seen his father come home toothless after being interrogated by Nazis and escaped relatively unscathed from his family’s car being strafed by gunfire.
Speaking to a packed room in the Curry Student Center on Northeastern University’s Boston campus, Berger shared his story during the Philip N. Backstrom Jr. Survivor Lecture as part of Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week.
Together with his grandson, Noah Ben-Zion, a political science and history student at Northeastern and Ruderman Scholar, he told his story, one of survival, persistence and, ultimately, joy in the aftermath of tragedy, with a mix of humor, gravitas and, despite it all, optimism.
“I don’t want to speak of hatred,” Berger says. “I just want to tell people what happened because using hatred does not tell the story as it is.”
Berger was born on Sept. 20, 1937, in Subotica, Yugoslavia. His father, a pediatrician, moved his family to Belgrade to work as a physician right before the war broke out. In 1941, Berger’s father was drafted to serve in the Yugoslav Army; the same year, Germany invaded and bombed Belgrade.
Berger recalls being rushed into his father’s office to be shielded in an X-ray room until the bombing ended. Once the bombs stopped falling, his mother collected her two children, some flour and some sugar, jumped in the car and started driving back to Subotica from Belgrade.
“We’re going and going toward Subotica, when all of a sudden the Germans came back,” Berger says. “Quickly, we get out of the car, and the car gets strafed. What I remember is the flour and the sugar pouring out of the truck.”
His family got back in the bullet-ridden car and arrived in Subotica a few days later, but the city had changed radically since being occupied by the Nazis. Speaking Serbian was grounds for an arrest, so Berger’s family kept him in the house for two months until he could speak Hungarian.
Meanwhile, a Nazi officer was stationed with a dog near the apartment Berger and his family were staying in. Although Berger does not recall being mistreated, his father, who had also returned to Subotica, had a different experience with the Nazis.
“[My father] was taken away by the Nazis, questioned and they didn’t like the answers that he gave,” Berger says. “When he came back, he came back toothless.”
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The Bergers once again fled from Subotica to Budapest, which became the center of Nazi activity with the arrival of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi officer and one of the minds behind the Holocaust. In 1944, he started deporting 12,000 Jews per day to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
However, Berger and his family escaped that fate due to a series of events. At the same time that Eichmann was deporting Jews, he was negotiating with Rezső Kasztner, a Hungarian-Israeli lawyer and leader of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland in exchange for money and diamonds. Berger and his family were among the few chosen for the so-called Kasztner train.
Kasztner’s involvement in the war remains controversial and he was later accused of being a Nazi collaborator and for not informing the remaining Hungarian Jews about the certain death that awaited them in Auschwitz.
It was far from a luxury train ride, Berger says: It was a train of 30 cattle cars. However, it was still a ride away from certain death, and even amid all the chaos of the initial ride, Berger’s father delivered a baby, using Berger’s shoelaces to tie the umbilical cord.
Their hopes of escaping were complicated when the Switzerland-bound train was held up at the Austrian border and, three and a half days later, diverted to Bergen Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany largely used to keep prisoners of war. Eventually, Jews like Berger were held there and used as hostages in exchange for German POWs. Although it was not explicitly used for mass killing, between 1941 and 1945, 20,000 Soviet POWs and 50,000 inmates died at Bergen Belsen due to malnourishment and diseases like typhus and tuberculosis.
Despite the inhumane living conditions, Berger had opportunities to be a child. He would play soccer with the other children, although it didn’t always last long. He recalls a moment when he accidentally kicked the ball over to where the Russian prisoners were being held, and a Nazi pierced the ball with his bayonet and brought it back to Berger deflated.
“Of course, we couldn’t blow it up again,” he says.
While in the camp, Berger turned 7 years old, which his mother still found a way to celebrate.
“My mom saved half a slice of bread every day for a week, and she made, using a little bit of jelly, a pie or a cake for me,” Berger says. “That was my seventh birthday present.”
Then, one day, Berger, his family and the rest of the Jews at Bergen Belsen were given food, clothes and a ride aboard a normal passenger train to Switzerland. His family ended up living in Switzerland until 1947, at which point they managed to secure passage to the United States thanks to a sponsorship from American friends of Berger’s father.
After an eight-and-a-half-day journey by ship, Berger and and his family arrived in New York City. He still remembers waking up in the Bronx the day after they arrived and having his first American breakfast: “Snap, crackle and pop: Rice Krispies!”
From there, Berger’s life became an almost idealized version of the immigrant story. He went to school and eventually ran a successful obstetrics and gynecology practice from 1971 to 2004, met the love of his life in Israel and had a daughter and two grandsons. His life is forever marked by what he experienced as a child, but it’s clear his life has not been defined solely by tragedy and trauma.
In telling his story, he maintains a sense of humor, positive attitude and zest for life that shows a man who insists on finding joy in the aftermath of tragedy.
“[I] delivered a lot of babies, saved a lot of lives and enjoyed my life,” Berger says.
It helps that he is not the only one telling this story anymore. At a time when knowledge of the Holocaust is decreasing among younger generations in the U.S., Noah Ben-Zion sees an even greater need to keep his grandfather’s story alive.
“I can recite the story myself,” says Ben-Zion, Berger’s grandson. “In the future when he may not be around anymore, I’m going to continue to do this on my own. … This story has been part of my entire life. It’s why I’m a history major.”