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SATURDAY OCTOBER 24 | SUNDAY OCTOBER 25 2015
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NEWS
Deer Path Inn Grows Into 21st Century BY STEVE SADIN DAILYNORTHSHORE.COM
W
hen the next movie star arrives for a stay at the Deer Path Inn, the actor will not have to head to Sears to buy a new mattress like Carol Burnett did 37 years ago. The comfort of the renovated historic hotel set to reopen by the end of the year is one of the assurances General Manager Matt Barba gave more than 75 people at the monthly meeting of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Chamber of Commerce Oct. 14 at the Lake Forest Club. During a question and answer session after Barba’s update of the massive year-long renovation project, Jim Warfield of Lake Forest recounted the story of Burnett’s discomfort when she stayed at the hotel while filming Robert Altman’s 1979 film “The Wedding.” “She went to Sears to buy a new Continued on PG 12
REMEMBERING ‘CHILDREN OF LA HILLE’ Holocaust survivor recounts how he escaped Nazis
BY EMILY SPECTRE DAILYNORTHSHORE.COM
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he year was 1939, and a 15-year-old Jewish boy was traveling alone on a train to Brussels to escape his native Germany where the Nazi regime had seized power. He was leaving behind his parents and two younger brothers to live with strangers, under a Belgian children’s refugee program sponsored by a Jewish women’s group. At that time his fate was unknown, but this young man not only escaped certain death from the Nazis, but went on to become an American citizen
Brothers Kurt, Walter, and Herbert Reed. Photo taken in 1934, Mainstockheim, Germany
and bravely served the U.S. Army to help defeat Nazi Germany. While this story sounds like the plot of a Steven Spielberg movie, it is the true story of Walter Reed, a 40-year resident of Wilmette. For the past five years, Reed has been researching and writing a book about his experience and that of 100 other
German and Austrian children who were part of a Jewish children’s refugee colony, known as the “Children of La Hille.” While most Americans are familiar with the horrifying statistics of World War II — six million people were killed in the Holocaust — few realize that one million of those victims were children. Given those
numbers, it is remarkable that only 11 of the 100 Children of La Hille were caught, deported and murdered by the Nazis. “That is an incredible record entirely due to the fact that these women tried to protect and rescue us,” Reed said. The book, The Children of La Hille: Eluding Nazi Capture During World War II , focuses on the individual stories of those children and the heroes who risked their lives to save them. Reed shares what it was like to be a Jewish child and live in fear during the Nazi regime. “Most people don’t know what it was like to be persecuted as a child,” Reed explained. He also shares details about the Swiss and Belgian women and men who were instrumental in rescuing the Children of La Hille. “The people that were helping us were just heroic people,” he said. The book starts on Kristallnacht in 1938, when all German-Jewish men and older boys were arrested and put into jail by the Nazis. Reed and his father were arrested in their small village near Wuerzburg, Bavaria. When Reed’s parents learned that Belgium was accepting Jewish children as refugees, they quickly put their oldest son on a train for Brussels in June of 1939. Reed’s time in Brussels was short-lived and in less than a year he and 100 other boys and
girls left the Belgian refugee camps for Southern France, escaping the German army’s invasion of Brussels by a mere two days. The children ultimately settled in a 15th century chateau, the Chateau de La Hille in Southern France. Life there was by no means easy; Reed recalls inadequate food, heat and clothing, as well as being being forbidden to speak German. By way of Spain and Portugal, Reed ultimately immigrated to New York City in August 1941, through the efforts of his mother’s siblings (all of whom lived in New York) and the New York based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). After he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Reed’s path to citizenship was expedited by the U.S. government. “I was stateless because the Nazis took away my citizenship,” he said. Reed also decided to change his name from Werner Rindsberg to Walter Reed, noting that having a German-Jewish name at that time was viewed in a negative light by most people. But Reed, then just 19, worried what his parents would think. He didn’t know that his parents and two younger brothers had died in Poland in 1942. After the war, Reed went to college and became a successful businessman in Chicago as the Continued on PG 12
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