LUCKY LADY:

Author of Holocaust Memoir: Counts Herself Among the Lucky (Dan Mackie, 4/03/05, Valley News)

Betty Lauer says hers has been a lucky life.

Luck brought her to America, introduced her to her husband, bestowed such good health that at 79 it seems that time has been a benefactor, not a thief.

Lucky in life, lucky in love?

It's not all as simple as whistling a happy tune. Lauer, who lives in Wilder now, grew up in Germany in the 1930s, a Jewish girl in a nation that was about to criminalize her very existence.

She lost 96 relatives in the Holocaust; her only sibling, a sister, Eva, vanished. After they were deported to Poland, Lauer survived by assuming a false identity -- a Polish Catholic girl with peroxide blond hair and a fake birth certificate. Bertel Weissberger became Krystyna Zolkos.

During the war years, Lauer depended on the kindness of friends and sidestepped the hatred of strangers, narrowly escaping detection several times. Fear was a fog that never lifted. Anxiety squeezed her stomach.

But she survived, when so many did not.

When asked how that could be, what strength she had that made it possible, how she accounts for it, she hesitates, and offers an answer and a nonanswer both: “One word,'' she says, “Luck. I was lucky.’’

Lauer has told her story in Hiding in Plain Sight, a book that came out in May of last year and is about to go into a third printing with Smith & Kraus of Lyme. She will discuss it next Saturday, April 9, at 4 p.m. at the Congregation Shir Shalom in Woodstock. Organizers hope people of all faiths, and teenagers, especially, will attend.

In a recent interview, Lauer said the event will be more of a dialogue with the audience than a talk. She hesitates to try to capture her story in a formal speech -- this is a topic for which words can seem too small. It took 550 pages to tell it all in her book, which she declined to trim despite the advice of her publisher. “I insisted, nicely, that the book be published the way I wrote it,'' she said.

In Hiding, Lauer chronicles the anxious hours and daily struggle she faced during her years in Germany and Poland. She rewrote it four times over 40 years, improving it as her English grew more proficient.

Lauer is pleased with the reviews and the personal responses she's received, which include a stack of letters and invitations to speak.

She'd love to have the book translated into German and Polish. “A new generation is growing up. They want to know'’ about the Nazi era, when an advanced industrial country devolved into a murder machine. “If you ask me why, I can't answer that,’’ said Lauer. “I spend a lot of time thinking about it and reading about it. Such a civilized country, that they could descend to these lower depths. … Is that a danger for every society?'’

She expresses little bitterness toward the country that took so much from her. “You can't blame people two generations later,'’ she said, although she said she never accepted the claim of many older Germans that they weren't aware of what was happening. “That was a great lie. How can you not know what is going on in your backyard?’’ she asked. On the other hand, she remains in contact with German friends. “They are beautiful people,'’ she said.

Despite the sort of history that has broken many people, Lauer said she went on to live a fortunate, happy life. After the war, she and her mother, Ilona, came to New York, which seemed “a paradise'' to Lauer.

Her father, Oskar, had gone there before the war, and was anxiously trying to arrange their immigration when the Nazi rampage began. In Germany, he'd have had little chance of survival. “So it was the only way,'’ she said.

Lauer earned a master's degree in America and taught German in high school and German literature at Queens College in New York. Some might be surprised that that she would study the culture of a nation whose leaders literally wanted her dead. “The literature is great,'’ she says in reply. “Knowing German literature, that wasn't how Germany was supposed to end.’’

She married a lawyer, Lawrence Lauer, whom she met at an upstate resort. They raised two sons, and dreamed of someday moving to Vermont, which they did in recent years after he retired. She said wistfully they waited too long to come here; he died less than five years after they moved. “He loved it so,” she said.

Despite having been one of the editors whose advice she ignored, I couldn't be happier for her success. She's an amazing lady and her husband was extraordinarily kind and decent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2005 10:59 AM