4 Lives Torn by Nazis Split on Reunification : Fascism: Ex-GI, ex-Nazi youth, Jewish woman and ‘righteous Gentile’ reflect on Germany’s past, and future.

One was an American soldier, plucked in his youth from the Midwest and thrust into war on two continents before the Nazi beast was finally defeated. In Paris, meanwhile, a young German indoctrinated with Nazi teachings ended the war a prisoner, his repugnant philosophy rendered meaningless.

In Germany, a 14-year old Jewish girl on a march to a new death camp escaped into the forest; the girl’s father and brother had already been killed. And in Poland, a young woman who had risked her life hiding Jews during much of the war lost her fiance, a Polish partisan, to a German bullet the day before their wedding.

And so the war ended. Four souls, their innocence and youth shredded by a monstrous regime, were returned to a shattered world, and found ways to live lives worth living.

Today, as Germany is whole again for the first time since the days of Adolf Hitler, all four are in Orange County. The American is a retired career soldier; the war prisoner a professor of German at UCI; the Jewish girl is his colleague and friend, currently the department chair; the Pole is an inspirational speaker revered by Jewish groups for her heroic deeds.

Each of them has a unique perspective about reunification of the country that so altered their lives. For the most part they are optimistic, but coloring their emotions is a thoughtful cautiousness that warns those who would celebrate too loudly to watch for dark clouds. For one, the clouds have never lifted; her hope now is that they grow no darker, and never bring rain.

Prof. Ruth Kluger, a survivor of three concentration camps, is optimistic about a united Germany’s chances of becoming a successful nation on good terms with the rest of the world--but sometimes her sentiments come out in odd ways.

“They’re prejudiced, they’re pretty awful toward minorities, and they’re getting worse,” said Kluger, the UCI German department head who spent the last two years running a University of California exchange program in Goettingen. “But they’re not belligerent. . . . I think that they are not dangerous.”

That said, though, Kluger believes the German revolution is a positive development and that the new Germany could act as a bridge between its Western partners and former Eastern allies.

“I don’t think you can redeem the past, but it would be poetic justice if they do something for peace,” Kluger said in an interview at her University Hills home. “One should not belittle this revolution. One should not put it down in any way.”

Kluger was just 11 when she and her family were torn from their home in Vienna and transported to a concentration camp in Theresienstadt, in what is now Czechoslovakia. She and her mother survived transports to two other camps, including Auschwitz, and escaped into the forest near the end of the war during a march to a fourth camp. Her father and brother were killed in one of the camps.

Fourteen years old at the end of the war, Kluger came to New York in 1947, studied English at Hunter College and later German literature at Berkeley, and came to UCI to teach German in 1976. Her mother lives in Sherman Oaks.

Her wartime experience, she says, certainly colors her perceptions of modern-day Germany, but she thinks the current generation of Germans is “no better, no worse . . . maybe even less nationalistic” than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.

“People are no older than their age,” she said. “You start at birth.”

Distrust between East and West Germans--many Westerners fear that unity will cost them too much, while some East Germans see their Western compatriots as overly greedy capitalists--should be seen as a family squabble, Kluger says.

“It’s sibling rivalry,” she said. “They’re scared that the other guy will get a bigger Christmas present.”

What was East Germany yesterday will be the new Germany’s West Virginia--with time, it will get richer, Kluger says. And if reunification proves expensive to Germans accustomed to the good life?

“Maybe they’ll take fewer vacations in Majorca and Egypt,” she joked.

UCI German professor Herbert Lehnert, who lives a few blocks from Kluger in the hills behind the Irvine campus, could hardly have had a wartime background that differed more from his colleague’s.

But his thoughts on the new Germany are remarkably similar. He, too, is optimistic, yet at the same time concerned that Germans do not view the death of socialism as an excuse to abandon their tradition of social concern and engage in unfettered free-market capitalism.

“Socialist theory provided a basis for a critique that is very necessary to us,” Lehnert said. “This certainly is a victory for democracy, the market economy and civil rights. I worry, though, that we overemphasize victory and lose the critical perspective.”

An expert on Thomas Mann who taught in Canada, Texas and Kansas before coming to California, Lehnert’s social-democrat political philosophy has evolved markedly from his days as a schoolboy in Luebeck, near Hamburg in northern Germany.

His elementary school teacher was “an ardent Nazi,” Lehnert recalls, and he was given a thoroughly nationalistic education that included membership in a Nazi youth organization.

He was inculcated with an ideology so poisonous, he says today, that it encouraged family members to betray one another.

“I remember in 1942, I was at the typewriter writing an essay on the Jewish question,” Lehnert said. “My father asked me if I knew what was happening to the Jews, and I said they were deported. He left it at that and walked away.”

If Lehnert’s father had spelled out for him the gruesome details of Hitler’s Final Solution, Lehnert says, “I could have betrayed him. . .. That was one of the most terrible things about the Nazi ideology, that you could betray your parents.”

Lehnert enlisted in the German army at the age of 18, and he was taken prisoner in August, 1944, in Paris. It was there, in the POW camps, that he began to question his upbringing.

“It took a few years to get rid of the last remains of this ideology,” said Lehnert, who studied German literature in Kiel, Germany, after the war “to find out what Germany really was.”

He emerged with an anti-ideological (“Ideologies are wrong per se for my generation,” he says), socially concerned world view that allows him to look with favor on the new Germany while remaining cognizant of people’s fears.

“I understand Polish feelings,” he said. “But 16 million people clearly voted for the West. . . . I don’t see how anyone can refuse them access to our system.”

Jack Smith spends part of every day at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Anaheim, surrounded by service buddies and pictures, ready to regale anyone who asks with a story or two.

“They had us (in their grasp) there for awhile,” said Smith, remembering his battalion’s march through Italy. It was only a temporary setback, and the 409th Anti-Aircraft Battalion, which began the war in North Africa, eventually marched through France and Germany before war’s end found them in Austria.

Smith, known around the post simply as “Ol’ Sarge,” bears no grudge against Germans or Germany and sees reunification in a wholly positive light.

“They’re brothers,” said Smith. “It’s a good thing.”

An Anaheim resident who retired from the Army in 1966 after nearly 25 years of service, Smith thinks Germany is different enough today to avoid a repeat of its disastrous history.

“As far as the German people themselves go, you’ll never have another Hitler right there,” Smith said. “By the end of the war, they’d had enough of the Nazis, and in 90% of the cases it wasn’t their fault--it was Hitler and the rowdy bunch he had.”

Reports of German politicians already talking of reclaiming territory given to Poland do not faze the old soldier either.

“That’s just a bunch of hard-heads,” Smith said. “You’ve got some of those over here too.”

Millions may rejoice for Germany today, but Irene Opdyke of Yorba Linda will not be one of them.

“I was not elated when the (Berlin) Wall came down,” Opdyke said. “I was born in Poland . . . and I was in Europe when Hitler unleashed unspeakable horrors that spread like wildfire. He invaded my country, and used it to kill human beings. Now that Germany is united, I am afraid.”

Opdyke, 68, received a medal of honor as a “Righteous Gentile” from the Israeli group Yad Vashem for her courageous behavior during the war. Her story has been told in television documentaries, in countless articles and by herself at numerous appearances before civic and student groups across the country.

It is a deeply moving story whose power is undiminished by its repetition.

Opdyke, then Irene Gut, was studying nursing and found herself cut off from her parents and four sisters when Nazi storm troopers swept across Poland in 1939. She fled to the Ukraine, was brutalized by Russian soldiers and eventually wound up working as a housekeeper for a German major not entirely enamored of the Nazis.

For eight months, as Hitler’s Gestapo liquidated the Jewish populations of nearby ghettos, and at first unbeknown to the major, Gut hid a dozen Jews in the cellar of the villa in the village of Tarnopole, bringing them food and carefully guarding the only key to their door.

One Jewish couple, Ida and Lazer Haller, became expectant parents while in hiding; they told Gut they wanted to abort the fetus because a baby would give them all away.

Gut told them she had already seen enough children die in the war and persuaded the Hallers that they would be free by the time their baby was due.

She was right. In March, 1944, with Russians closing in, the major evacuated the villa, and Gut and the 12 Jews escaped to the forest, separating in their rush to safety. While making her way back to her hometown, Gut fell in love with a Polish partisan, but the day before they were to be married, he said he needed to lead an attack against the Germans.

He was shot dead that day.

Unable to find her sisters, Gut wound up in Germany and then, in 1949, came to the United States. Six years later, she married Bill Opdyke, the U.N. representative who interviewed her at the repatriation camp in Germany.

In 1985, Opdyke was reunited with her four sisters in Poland for the first time in 46 years.

Two years ago, she flew to Munich for the bar mitzvah of the son of Roman Haller--the infant conceived under Opdyke’s protection.

Opdyke is a woman full of love and hope, and the message she delivers in her speeches is that people must stand up in the face of intolerance, no matter who is the target.

But she will not stick her head in the sand “like an ostrich,” she says.

“Freedom is the most important thing, and I hope against hope that this (reunification) works out OK,” Opdyke said. “I think we have to watch them very carefully. . . . Common sense and what I lived through will tell you that.”

THROWING OUT THE BOOK: History texts lose ground to European developments. E1