Joanne Gordon,counting the days until her son's return;Diana Sotelo, happy to be back at meetings;and in honor of Paul's last meeting with gratitude,Ron Davis, Jim Berardi, Henry Lipson, Paul Munk and Cynthia Plouche.
Steen Metz told the Club of his Holocaust Survivor’s story.
In 1943, eight year old Steen and his parents were arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from their home in Odense, Denmark. This work camp held constant hunger, brutal living conditions and death. Some 15,000 children passed through Theresienstadt; he is one of fewer than 1500 who survived.
His father died of starvation after less than six months in the camp. Steen and his mother spent a total of eighteen months at the camp and were liberated in April 1945 by the Red Cross “White Buses”- just one month before the camp was scheduled to launch the newly installed gas chamber.
After the war, he and his mother returned to Odense where he completed high school and business college in Copenhagen. He started his career in the food industry in Denmark, which later took him to England and then Canada. It was in Toronto that he met and married his wife. They moved to the United States in 1962 and raised two daughters in Deerfield. He worked for Sara Lee, Kraft and McCormick until retiring in 1999.
Like many Holocaust Survivors, he kept his experiences private for many years. In 2011, he was ready to share his story and completed his memoirs with a self-published book “A Danish Boy in Theresienstadt”. Since writing his memoirs, it has become his life’s work to share his experiences with as many people as possible so we may never forget.
