Larry Orbach - Young Lothar: An Underground Fugitive in Nazi Berlin

LARRY (LOTHAR) ORBACH (19242008) was growing up in a patriotic German-Jewish family in Berlin when Hitler rose to power. In 1942, he went underground with false papers as pool-hustler Gerhard Peters. He was captured in 1944 and sent first to Auschwitz, then to a slave-labor camp and on a death march to Buchenwald, where he was liberated at war's end. After emigrating to the U.S. he married a fellow refugee from Nazi Berlin, Ruth Geier (d. 1999), and launched a successful jewelry messenger-service in Manhattan. Settling in Union, New Jersey, the Orbachs had two children, Vivien and Richard; Larry's mother, Nelly, who also survived in hiding in Berlin, lived with them. Mother and son kept their vow never to be separated again.

Larry lived out his own final years in his beloved Manhattan, surrounded by friends from all walks of life.

VIVIEN ORBACH-SMITH , Larry's daughter, is an adjunct associate professor of journalism at New York University. A native of New Jersey, she earned her own B.A. and M.A. degrees from NYU and began her career there as a development writer. Today she works as a freelance writer, book-editor and college-essay coach. An eloquent voice of the Second Generation, she has addressed many audiences on inherited trauma and on diversity, democracy and social-justice issues. She taught classes on the Holocaust to teenagers in synagogue religious-schools for many years.

Vivien lives with her husband in Fairfield County, Connecticut. They have three grown children and three little grandchildren.

This is a book to make one both smile and weep, to admire the generosity of spirit of courageous individuals and to despair of the selfish inhumanity of those who passed by on the other side. Larry Orbach's story of survival against impossible odds opens a window into the seamy underworld of wartime Berlin and into the limitless extremes of good and evil of which our species is capable.

Bernard Wasserstein, author of On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War

An exciting and unusual mixture of Holocaust journal, coming-of-age story, and memoir of life on the seedy underside of Berlin during World War II this is totally compelling, and one of the rarer stories of the Holocaust.

Kirkus Reviews

Vital, youthful reading Never loses its vivacity or humour. Stands next to Anne's diary on the same shelf, with the same living message.

Morning Star

An important work that must be read by all a literary work worthy of Dostoevsky.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Imagine a Holocaust memoir so startling, so intriguingly and beautifully told, that you don't want to put it down full of love and sex, terror and joy clear-eyed, warm, intelligent and never bitter. This is a transcendent book.

Greenwich Time

Reads like a novel ironic, adventuresome and true.

Michael Berenbaum, former president and CEO of the Shoah Foundation

Published in 2017 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 1996, 2017 Vivien Orbach-Smith

This edition taken from Soaring Underground published by the Compass Press in 1996

The right of Larry Orbach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the licensor in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

ISBN: 978 1 78453 763 0

eISBN: 978 1 78672 173 0

ePDF: 978 1 78673 173 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

I dedicate this book to my beloved wife, Ruth Geier Orbach,
and to the memory of my dear parents, Nelly and Aaron Orbach.

Larry Orbach (1996)

In memory of my parents and my teachers,
Ruthchen and Lotharchen, zl
who created for me a home in the world;
and dedicated to the generations after:
their grandchildren
my dearest Tahlia, Arielle, Jacob, Juliet Nelly, Rachel Claire
and their great-grandchildren
my sweetest Margot Rivkah, Nava Daisy, Eliezer Irving.
May their world be peaceful, tolerant and free.

Vivien Orbach-Smith (2017)

* * * * * * *

I sometimes ask myself: Would anyone, either Jew or non-Jew, understand this about me that I am just a young girl badly in need of some rollicking fun?

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Lothar Orbach with his mother, Nelly, and a cousin (Frieda Reich, left) en route to America (September 1946)

Contents

Preface to the New Edition

I T WAS IN THE EARLY 1990S THAT MY FATHER FIRST ASKED ME TO HELP HIM tell the story of his cataclysmic coming-of-age in Hitler's Berlin. The result was this revealing and unusual memoir, originally published in 1996 (by a small press in the U.S.) as Soaring Underground. The idiosyncratic title was my paean to its protagonist: Lothar, the wily Jewish youth whose light would not be extinguished even in the darkest of times and places.

This audacious life-force would remain the essence of Larry Lothar Orbach (19242008), unstoppable dreamer and doer, steadfast son of his people, lover of all humanity.

I am deeply grateful to I.B.Tauris and especially to editor Tatiana Wilde for recognizing the raw power and instructiveness of his story, and for giving it new life, in a new and unsettling day, as Young Lothar.

In co-authoring this memoir I became a writer/daughter on a mission: to give voice to the suffering, joys and complex humanity of not only Lothar, but the 6 million European Jews 1.5 million of them, children who were killed under systematic, targeted, state-sponsored genocide.

Yet my initial impulse, when my father approached me, was to avert my eyes and run. I wasn't sure I had the stomach to hear everything that had been done to Daddy, or (especially) everything Daddy had done.

What caused all hesitation to vanish, only a few months later, was a most jarring encounter, something literally out of a book by Philip Roth.

Roth's father, Herman, regularly played cards with Larry at their neighborhood Y. Larry was bowled over when the elder Roth invited him home to show a few pages of his nascent writings to the celebrated author-son.

Prior to this, Larry had read only one of Philip Roth's masterworks: the carnal tour-de-force Portnoy's Complaint. In a comically misguided effort to impress a literary lion, Larry (unbeknownst to us) handed him a detailed scene of his loss of virginity. Missing from his baroque rewrite was its sobering context: that shacking up with lonely Frau Trudy was all that stood between him and streets teeming with Gestapo.

Roth leafed through the excerpt and offered no comment, reported my disappointed father, and everyone forgot about it. Except, evidently, Philip Roth.

In 1991 Roth published his own memoir,