LAGUNA NIGUEL –Given in friendship, the inscription reads, in German.
Walter Lachman thumbs through a children’s book he received in December 1937.
It is the lone remnant of his youth – before the Nazis herded up the Jews in Berlin and took them away.
“In the concentration camps, we had nothing,” Lachman, 86, of Laguna Niguel says. “They wiped out the whole past of our lives.”
For most of his life, Lachman never spoke of being taken away at age 13, or his time in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where 50,000 died, including Anne Frank.
Lachman’s was a story that went untold.
It took a teacher at his grandson’s Hebrew school to get him to tell it in 2008.
And it took a broken camera to get him to tell it again. And again. Until six years later, when schoolchildren in Tennessee were pitching in to help. And a neighborhood in Massachusetts was pitching in. And people in Berlin, London and Washington, D.C., were all helping to make a documentary on him.
That documentary, “3½ Years Without A Toothbrush,” premieres in Santa Ana tonight, two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It is not a story about death – though Lachman saw enough of that. It is a story about life.
• • •
Lachman was 5 when Hitler took power.
Soon the Jewish boy had to turn in his bike. Then his dog. Then his family couldn’t subscribe to newspapers. Or ride streetcars. Or shop in some stores.
In 1938 came Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were ransacked and synagogues burned. In 1941 came the yellow stars Jews had to sew onto their clothes. In 1942, came the trains to take them away.
By then, Lachman’s father had died of tuberculosis and his mother of leukemia. So the 13-year-old boy boarded a freight car with his grandmother. For seven days they stood. Their toilet was a bucket. And the January nights grew colder and colder.
“It was the first time I ever saw a person die,” Lachman recalls.
And not the last.
• • •
In 2008, Lachman agreed to speak to his grandson’s Hebrew class at Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley.
Teacher Adrienne Greenberg’s video camera was broken so she called her friend, filmmaker Ren Blood, of Stanton, to help.
They planned to make a keepsake for Lachman to show his family.
But Blood was mesmerized by what she heard. She began to film Lachman again and again.
Blood had spent $55,000 of her own money to make her last film. She didn’t know what this might cost, but she didn’t care.
“His story was too important,” she says. “So I called in a whole bunch of favors for camera people and equipment.”
And she began placing calls around the world.
• • •
At age 13, Lachman was put into a ghetto in Riga, Latvia.
That’s where his grandmother was shot, leaving the plump little boy alone with no one to love. And no one to love him.
He survived on turnips, beets and frozen potatoes.
Out of boredom, he volunteered to sort clothes, which probably saved his life. Eventually he learned to repair German uniforms taken from dead soldiers at the front lines. Lachman became a valuable worker.
At age 15, he was moved to a nearby concentration camp, Kaiserwald, to continue his work.
Then in late 1944, as Allied forces closed in on Germany, he was moved again – to a camp designed to hold 20,000 but overflowing with 60,000 prisoners.
“There was no food, no water, no sanitation,” he says of Bergen-Belsen. “We drank water from a pond that had dead bodies in it. It was indescribable.”
• • •
Blood and Greenberg planned to make an educational documentary, free to schools. But even that would cost $17,000, which they didn’t have.
So they put out word on Facebook and IndieGoGo, an online crowdfunding site.
“My mom donated money,” Greenberg says. “My former rabbi donated money. A girl I grew up with donated almost $300.”
Greenberg told an eighth-grade teacher in Cookeville, Tenn., whose class raised $500. “This is for Walter,” they wrote.
A neighborhood in Springfield, Mass., where Lachman once lived, began sending checks, too.
But the project still was short. Blood phoned one of Lachman’s old neighbors, who’d already donated $180.
Susan Leavitt had never met the filmmaker, but she knew one thing – her departed father, Julian Leavitt, had been dear friends with Lachman.
“I felt my father would’ve said, ‘This needs to be done,’” says Leavitt.
She donated the entire $8,000 needed to finish the film.
• • •
It was 69 years ago this month that British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen.
They found 13,000 unburied dead, and 60,000 living ghosts – dying from typhus and starvation at a rate of 500 a day.
“We were free,” Lachman says. “But too weak to celebrate.”
A year later, he arrived in America with the clothes on his back. He moved to Springfield to live with his father’s sister, and became a stock boy at a clothing store. He eventually became a salesman, a manager and owner of three stores.
Meanwhile, he married and raised two daughters. He lived a full and happy life, never talking of the past.
“Bitterness is a wasted emotion,” he says. “I want to focus less on the past and more on what we can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
That’s why he agreed to make the documentary.
It contains archival photos from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; archival film from the British Imperial War Museum; it contains motion-graphics and an original score. And it contains something else.
“It’s the Holocaust in Walter,” says filmmaker Blood. “It’s any genocide in Walter. It’s human resilience in Walter.”
“And yet,” she adds, “he still says what we need to do is treat everyone the same. That no one is better or worse than anyone else.”
The film, like the book from Lachman’s childhood, is a gift given by many, in friendship.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6979 or tberg@ocregister.com
