Mourners Honor Holocaust Survivor Killed in Crash

A 77-year-old Holocaust survivor, who witnessed unspeakable horrors in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, was remembered Saturday as a woman of strength and faith.

Charlotte Lenga’s extraordinary life came to a tragic end Friday afternoon when a stolen Chevrolet Suburban being chased by police broadsided her compact car on White Oak Avenue near Miranda Street in Encino.

The driver of the large sport utility vehicle, James McMann, 22, of Chatsworth, who gave the false name Frank McIntyre when he was arrested, was being held Saturday without bail on suspicion of murder, said Officer Jason Lee, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman.

Lenga and six other Holocaust survivors filed a lawsuit last year against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and several German companies, accusing the firms of using slave labor during the Holocaust.

“To have survived what she survived and to have her life end this way is a real pity,” said Arthur Stern, chairman of the Holocaust Restitution Committee of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.

“It requires guts to start a lawsuit,” he added. “And it’s the right thing to do.”

The fatal accident Saturday was the tragic conclusion to a high-speed police pursuit through the heart of the San Fernando Valley that began in Northridge at 12:20 p.m. Friday and ended an hour later in Encino.

The chase began in the 17700 block of Lanark Street when a police officer spotted a man loading items into a white van, police said.

With helicopters and patrol cars tracking him, police said, McMann refused to pull over and drove to Panorama City, where he lost control of the van and slammed into a ground-floor apartment on Nordhoff Street.

Police said McMann pulled himself from the debris, entered an adjacent apartment and demanded that the resident hand over the keys to the Suburban.

McMann then drove to Encino, where Lenga was struck and killed as she made a left turn into the path of the speeding Suburban, police said.

Lenga was born on Sept. 28, 1923, in Jasina-Korosmezo in what was formerly Czechoslovakia, and survived concentration camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

According to court papers, the Nazi regime took Lenga from her home and transported her from a Jewish ghetto in Mateszalko to Auschwitz, where she arrived on May 21, 1944.

For the remainder of World War II, Lenga was forced to work for German industry under inhumane conditions, as well as to sort through prisoners’ personal possessions for precious metal items to be remelted.

The guards brutally beat Lenga, then forced her to work a 12-hour shift, still bloody and swollen from being beaten. She was enslaved until March 1945, when she was sent on a “death march” to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated that May.