There have been many unfortunate incidents lately here in Eretz Yisrael, but here is a heartwarming story
A Nazi Officer’s Daughter Becomes a Jewish Matriarch
by Yehudis Litvak
Raised in a Nazi home during World War II, Hannah Sperber converted to Judaism and raised a Jewish family.
Full of energy and optimism, Hannah Sperber of Denver, CO, is eager to share the story of her “beautiful life, lovingly orchestrated by G–D,” though it took her many years to come to terms with her past.
Hannah was born in 1936 in Germany. Her father was an active member of the Nazi party. On his wedding picture, he is wearing a Nazi armband with a swastika.
Hannah was his second daughter. Her childhood was not a happy one. “It was an abusive situation,” she says. “My father was very cruel. He beat us very badly. I didn’t feel loved, or valued, or appreciated.”
As a child, Hannah had never met a Jew. She had only read about Jews in the Bible. Her family was nominally Christian but not religious. Her father had left the church because it opposed his marriage to Hannah’s mother.
Growing up, says Hannah, “I did not have a good feeling about my own religion. But even as a child, I prayed to G–D because I was in a very bad space even early on. I had no friends, nobody I could talk to, so I talked to G–D.”
World War II
In 1943, Hannah’s parents bought a house in a suburb of Nuremburg. Hannah recalls, “We moved in. It was a gorgeous house, everything shining and glitzing.”
But it didn’t last. While Hannah’s father was in the German army, the Allies began to bomb Nuremburg. Hannah’s family slept in the basement, amid the sirens and the whistling of the bombs. One night, a bomb hit right in front of their house, destroying it and starting a fire.
“I was under rubble,” Hannah recalls. “My mother found me and dug me out. We exited the house through a hole, seeing the whole world on fire. It appeared that way because the water puddles reflected the flames. And yet, when we walked through all of that, I felt so light, I felt like G–D was carrying me.”
The entire family survived but was left homeless. Hannah was sent to stay with relatives. “I lived a year and a half with hardly ever seeing my parents,” Hannah recalls. “I learned a lot in their house. It was a well-run home with caring and loving people. I felt valued there, like I counted as well. It was a very good feeling.”
During World War II, Hannah was not aware of the Holocaust or of Germany’s role in it. “The only thing I knew was that it was forbidden for anybody to listen to a foreign station, or read a foreign book, or read a foreign newspaper. Anybody who got caught was sent to a concentration camp. And those were not Jewish people. Those were neighbors. They were gone for several months and they came back looking like ghosts. They wouldn’t say one word about what they saw there.”
To this day, Hannah does not know what her father did in the army during the war. She suspects that he might have been stationed near Auschwitz, because “he had brought back some hand-carved plates and jewelry boxes that came from Zakopane, which is very close to there.” Later, he was deployed to the Russian front.
Hannah recalls that as a child during the war, she would go in the morning to get milk. “I would see the slow-moving trains with people in them. They were freight trains, not passenger trains.” Hannah wondered about these people. She was told that they were prisoners of war. “That’s all I knew,” she says.
Meeting Henry
In 1954, Hannah was 17 and in college, studying business and the English language. One evening, she missed her train home. As she was strolling through the train station, waiting for the next train, she recalls, “I feel this jolt, and I didn’t even know what it was. I hadn’t even noticed a person. But it was Henry. He turned around and asked me for some directions. He talked me into having a cup of coffee.”
Henry, who spoke fluent German, had come to Germany from America, as a soldier in the U.S. army. He ended up accompanying Hannah to her home.
Later that night, when the rest of the family went to sleep, Hannah climbed out of the window and met with Henry. She says, “I never met anybody who was so positive, such out-of-the-box thinking. Germans were so rigid – either this or nothing, black or white. I was in awe of some of the things that he did. I was fascinated with him. We dated, and we got to like each other more. I liked what he stood for, his honesty and integrity.”
Eventually, Hannah introduced Henry to her parents, who “liked him very much. He was a charismatic man.”
About six months into dating, Henry asked Hannah about her religion. She told him she was Protestant. He asked, “What do you think I am?”
Hannah replied, “You’re either Protestant or Catholic.”
But Henry was neither. “I could be a lot of things,” he said. “I could be Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Jewish.”
“What do you mean, Jewish?” Hannah asked.
“Why couldn’t I be Jewish?” he responded.
To Hannah, Jews were the people of the Bible, not real live people she could talk to.
Henry didn’t tell Hannah about his religion on that date. He asked her to think about it.
Afterwards, Hannah thought to herself that out of all the possibilities, Jewish sounded the most interesting. “That kind of resonated with me. I don’t know why.”
When on their next date Henry told Hannah that he was indeed Jewish, she was excited to hear that. However, this was also the first time that Hannah heard about the Holocaust, perpetrated by her own people. “I was just shocked,” she says. “I felt so guilty.”
Henry’s Story
Originally from Poland, Henry was a Holocaust survivor. During the war, his family posed as non-Jews. Henry’s father, who spoke fluent German, even repaired military vehicles for the German army.
Somehow the SS found out that he was Jewish and came to arrest him. Henry’s father resisted and the SS men beat him until he was unconscious. He died of his wounds. Henry’s mother was taken to Auschwitz. His two younger siblings were caught and murdered. Henry escaped but was left all alone at age 10.
Kind strangers took Henry in, and he lived on a farm in rural Poland for the rest of the war. Afterwards, he reunited with his mother, who had survived Auschwitz. They spend the next four years in a DP camp in Stuttgart, Germany. There, Henry’s mother remarried. In 1949, Henry came to Detroit, MI with his mother and stepfather.
In 1953, Henry enlisted in the U.S. army. He wanted to go to Korea, but instead was sent to Germany, where he was stationed for a year. It was during this time that he met Hannah.
Meeting Other Jews
In 1954, Henry had to go back to America. Hannah hoped to join him in America soon.
Before he left, Henry gave Hannah a gift – a necklace with a mezuzah on it. Hannah says, “I treasured it. I wore it every day.”
At work, someone noticed Hannah’s necklace and asked her why she didn’t come to the synagogue. Hannah didn’t even know there was a synagogue in town. She asked for directions.
The first time she came to the synagogue, “I just felt so at home,” she says. “It just felt so comfortable, like I’d always been there. It gave me a lot of comfort and joy.”
The synagogue was attended by American Jews, members of the military, both men and women. By then, Hannah knew English well enough to converse with them and to follow the prayerbook in English.
Hannah attended the synagogue every week until she left for America, learning about Jewish holidays as they occurred and picking up other bits and pieces of Jewish observance. She looked for books about Judaism in the local library but found nothing.
She shares, “Little by little I learned things. It wasn't easy because I was embarrassed to say that I'm not Jewish in the synagogue. Nobody knew. Once I found out what the Germans did, I felt so bad and so guilty about it that I didn't even want to touch that subject.”
Marriage
Meanwhile, Henry tried to get Hannah a visa to come to America, but it wasn’t so simple. Hannah needed a sponsor but Henry did not have enough money.
One day, a gentile Polish coworker asked Henry why he was distraught. Henry told him about Hannah’s visa troubles. The coworker said, “If you think she is this special, I will sponsor her.”
“Once again,” Hannah says, “I saw G–D’s hand.”
After a year and a half apart, during which Henry and Hannah corresponded by mail, they were finally reunited in Detroit.
Henry arranged for Hannah to rent a room in the home of a Russian Jewish family. Two weeks after her arrival, Hannah found a job. “I was never a burden to anybody,” she says.
It seemed that now Hannah and Henry could get married and live happily ever after. But one person stood in the way – Henry’s mother.
“My mother-in-law was very much against the marriage,” says Hannah. “I was not anything that she wanted. I could understand – I am from Germany, she lost her family to the Nazis, so she had a hard time with that.”
When Henry insisted that he planned to marry Hannah, his mother picked up a butcher knife and threatened to kill herself. But Henry knew his mother well enough to know she was not going to do it. He simply walked out.
When Hannah heard about it, she was terrified. “How could you walk out?” she said to Henry. “How can we go through with the marriage?”
But Henry reassured her that it was all going to work out, and he had been right. His mother “relented and made the wedding in her house,” says Hannah. “It was a very small wedding, with about twelve other people. The rabbi did not know that I wasn’t Jewish. Henry was against me converting. He said that I was Jewish to him and a piece of paper meant nothing.”
After their wedding, the couple rented an apartment in Detroit. Henry started an insulation company, together with his mother and stepfather. Henry and Hannah had three daughters. Hannah was busy raising her children and maintaining the company’s correspondence and bookkeeping, as well as obtaining leads and making appointments.
“I never thought it was too much or too hard even though I was busy late into the night,” says Hannah. “The children were the joy of my life. They are each talented in their own way, and Henry and I were very proud of them.”
In 1971, the Sperbers moved to Denver, CO.
At the beginning of her marriage, when Hannah was still learning how to cook, she purchased a Jewish cookbook. This was when she first learned about kosher. She began following the cookbook’s instructions in keeping a kosher kitchen. She also learned a lot about Jewish holidays from the cookbook, which described the special dishes for each holiday.
Though Henry was not particularly interested in keeping kosher, he appreciated the traditional Jewish dishes Hannah made. Even her critical mother-in-law enjoyed Hannah’s cooking.
Conversion to Judaism
All these years, Hannah was ashamed of her German background. Her friends naturally assumed that she was a German Jew, and she never told them otherwise.
“It was not a good thing in hindsight,” says Hannah. “Thank G–D, I am in a good space now, and I am able to say that without being embarrassed. We can’t pick our parents or our birthplace. G–D gives us what we need, and we just go forward.”
The fact that she wasn’t Jewish bothered Hannah. Whenever she brought it up with Henry, he would dismiss her concerns, but she was not satisfied.
“In 1964, I finally got through to Henry that I wanted to convert. I had found out that some people couldn’t have bar mitzvahs because there was an issue with the mother not being Jewish. Henry finally agreed to talk to the rabbi.”
The Conservative rabbi they approached asked Hannah about her Jewish observance. When he heard that she was already keeping kosher and the Jewish holidays, he immediately agreed to convert her and her daughters. Hannah and her little girls went to a mikveh, and she and Henry had another wedding.
Now Hannah felt that she was finally Jewish. “I was really happy with that,” she says.
Another Conversion
In 1979, Hannah’s oldest daughter, Pennie, was about to get married. Her fiancé, Jesse, whom she’d met in college, was a convert to Judaism.
Two weeks before the wedding, the Orthodox officiating rabbi called Hannah and apologetically told her that someone was questioning her Jewishness. The rabbi had not known that Hannah was a convert.
When Hannah told him her story, the rabbi informed her that the mikveh she had gone to was not kosher and her conversion was invalid according to Jewish law. He would not be able to officiate at the wedding.
“Henry was furious,” says Hannah. He wanted to switch to a different synagogue and urgently look for a different rabbi.
But Hannah told Henry, “You don’t have to do anything. I will do whatever it takes.” She was ready to follow the rabbi’s instructions and convert again.”
Pennie was shocked, because she had always considered herself Jewish, but in the end, she and Hannah went to the mikveh together. Then Hannah and Henry had to get married again before their daughter’s wedding.
“Pennie and Jesse had a beautiful wedding,” says Hannah. “Thank G–D, they have a good life.”
Great-Grandson’s Bar Mitzvah
Pennie’s children are now raising their own Jewish families. Recently, Hannah traveled to Israel to celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of her oldest great-grandson, Yosi, the son of Pennie’s daughter Chaya Sarah. “It was just wonderful!” she says. “Such a blessing!”
Hannah supports Jewish causes in both Israel and the US, including the Denver Kollel, where her grandson studies Torah. Together with her family, she also donated a Torah scroll.
Now well into her eighties, Hannah remains active and full of life. She misses Henry, who lost a valiant battle to lymphoma in 2003, but, she says, “I am very thankful and grateful that I can be part of my children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I love playing with the little ones and watching them mature. It’s beautiful! I am very blessed.”
https://aish.com/a-nazi-officers-daughter-becomes-a-jewish-matriarch/
NOTE: Hannah even has a Jewish look to her. Her attraction and efforts to live a Jewish life, guided surely by Hashem, even had a physical effect on her.
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