Samuel Lauber is one of three Holocaust survivors living in the City of Dayton. Lauber is an adjunct instructor in the sociology department at Sinclair Community College, where he has taught for three years.
“It’s very important for me to teach,” says Lauber. “To have a feeling of sharing my knowledge and experiences with students…so they can gain the greatest benefit, it’s a pleasure for me to do that.”
Lauber’s sociology and social work classes give him an ideal opportunity to talk about his background and about the themes of diversity and deviance.
“I’ve been well supported, and I enjoy my students and the experiences they share,” says Lauber.
Born in Belgium
Lauber was born in Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1942. Although Lauber was too young to remember many details, he knows he was born into a hostile environment. The local population in Antwerp was largely sympathetic to the Nazis.
Gentile children were forbidden from playing with Jewish children, Jewish doctors were barred from treating non-Jews, and Jews were ordered to wear yellow Juif stars, making identification and discrimination easy. Jewish business owners were also forced to close their doors.
Lauber’s mother owned an artificial flower business, which he said was destroyed during those early years.
With Antwerp looking increasingly bleak, Lauber’s family relocated to Brussels, where the locals were more sympathetic to Jews. From there, his father attempted to procure train tickets so the family could flee the country. On the way to the station, he was warned that Nazis were there checking records, deporting those caught and using their information to capture their families.
That was when Lauber’s parents made the decision to send him away.
“My parents said, ‘even if we’re arrested, if we’re caught, we want our son to go on living,’” says Lauber.
They contacted a group of nuns in a church in Brussels. The Mother Superior arranged for Sam, then 3 years old, to be sent to live with a gentile family in Lalouviere, Belgium, 50 kilometers from Brussels.
Hidden in Lalouviere
In Lalouviere, Lauber was taken in by the Detrys, were he lived as a member of the family.
The transition was difficult for Lauber.
“I had questions, I had all kinds of problems, because I was attached to my parents,” says Lauber,” when a child is born, he develops a bonding relationship with his parents, and that was cut.”
The family Lauber stayed with didn’t tell anyone else that he was a Jew.
“Nobody else knew,” says Lauber. “Except for a physician who took care of me at the time.”
Because the Jewish faith mandates circumcision, young boys such as Lauber were at a greater risk of being exposed than girls.
Lauber said he attended Christian church services with the Detry family, and did not know that he was Jewish. He remembers going to the cellar during the Allied bombing of the city.
Lauber stayed hidden with the family for about a year and a half.
In 1944, Allied forces liberated Belgium. “The next thing I realized,” says Lauber. “I was back in Bussels with my parents.”
Lauber’s parents never talked to him about what happened to them after they were separated. To this day, he does not know how they survived.
Move to New York
Lured by better employment prospects, the promise of a good education for their son, and the presence of relatives in New York; Lauber’s parents decided to move the family to America.
In 1948, after a weeklong journey, they arrived in New York.
“When we saw the statue of liberty, you can not image how cheerful [we were]. Everybody roared,” he says.
His father found piecemeal work sewing fur together for coats, his mother making artificial flowers from scratch. They lived in low-income projects, in what Lauber says was “the most difficult, gang-ridden neighborhood in Manhattan.”
When Lauber was 15, his mother passed away. His father followed three years later. Lauber attributes their early deaths to the stressful conditions they suffered through during the war.
Lauber joined the Air Force from 1963 to 1967 and went to school, earning a bachelor’s in sociology and a master’s in social work. He worked for 36 years as a civilian in the armed forces, moving around to 12 bases during his career, including several in Germany and Holland.
“For many years, I never discussed my story,” says Lauber.
In 1998, there was a conference for hidden children hosted by the Anti-Defamation League in New York, but he was unable to attend.
Lauber later planned a trip that took him past Lalouviere, where he visited the Detrys, the family that he said had saved his life many years before.
“It was wonderful,” he says. Lauber kept up correspondence with the Detry family for many years.
Lauber’s work for the military in Europe also gave him the opportunity to visit many of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. He visited camps and ghettos in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland, including Treblinka, Dachau, Terezin (infamous for the killing of children), and Auschwitz, which was only half an hour’s drive from his father’s home town of Chrzanow, Poland.
Lauber said that the experience was very personal, as he had lost family in the camps. “It’s horrendous,” he says. “I can not imagine how this happened and how bad it was.”
Sharing his story
The Hidden Child Foundation held another conference for hidden children in Detroit. This time, Lauber was able to attend in 2006.
Since then, he has been meeting with different groups, including university classes, Jewish Hillel groups and the Air Force Academy, to share his story, which has also been recorded in two books.
Lauber’s work on mental health issues with the Air Force has earned him two medals, the meritorious service award and the outstanding military service award.
Lauber says he’s very happy with Sinclair and with his department.
“I love this school,” he says, “I feel like this school is the number one community college in the U.S.”
Read about Lauber’s story in:
Holocaust Survivor Cookbook, by Joanne Caras
A Gift of Life, by Sylvain Brachfeld