Coming full circle with a message of hope

During the same week that Kristallnacht (the night of glass) occurred in Germany 72 years ago and ignited the Holocaust, Hewlett resident Marion Blumenthal Lazan will have a high school in her German hometown of Hoya named for her.

Lazan, who along with her mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, a spry 102, and brother Albert Blumenthal, survived several concentrations through a six-year period.

But her father, Walter Blumenthal, died of typhus shortly after being liberated. And it was three more years, before the surviving family made its way out of Germany to the U.S.

At one time, Lazan, who wrote with Lila Perl, a 1996 memoir about her life “Four Perfect Pebbles,” declared emphatically, “I’ll never set foot in Germany again!” has been back to her native country now a half-dozen times. This one is a 12-day trip ending Nov. 18.

“It is huge … we have come full circle,” said Lazan about having a school named after her. “Years ago in 1918, my father fought in World War Two for Germany and was awarded the Iron Cross. Not long after that they persecuted us, imprisoned us and wanted to destroy us in the worst possible manner. Now they are honoring us again.”

She noted that today’s generation in Germany has “bent over backwards to set things right,” and naming the “Marion Blumenthal Haupschule Hoya for her is a significant step to making amends, said Lazan, who has spoken in schools and churches her last five visits relaying her story of being in such camps as Westerbork in Holland and the more notorious Bergen-Belsen in Germany — the place where Anne Frank died.

Eike Reiche, the principal of the school, was one of those people who heard Lazan speak in Germany in 2001. When thinking of someone to name the school after, Lazan said, she remembered me and decided to name the school based on the criteria that it be a living woman with positive impact and influence.

Lazan learned of the honor in June during her last visit. When she told her mother, Meyberg smiled and said in German: “If one lives long enough, one will experience everything.”

Those experiences, including a documentary “Marion’s Triumph” about her life that has been broadcast on public TV stations and worldwide, have taken Lazan from a time when as 9 and 10-year-old would try to find four pebbles and if she found them her family would survive to believing that bridges must be built between people and following leaders blindly is not necessarily good.

It took her 50 years to return to her native country after dismissing the possibility of ever coming back, but after six visits Lazan has yet to come up with a new phrase to encapsulate her more recent experiences.

“I don’t know, I’ll have to think of something,” she said with a laugh. “Before 1995, I never thought I would ever return to this country. I have a message of hope. I am not angry and I don’t shout, I am very positive — it works.”