#187 - WE ARE LILLIAN BERLINER AND THE ULTIMATE COMEBACK FROM THE HOLOCAUST

This is a very special episode of the WASP, partly because I have a personal connection to our guest.  We often highlight inspirational stories about people making comebacks from things like addiction, obesity, and major injuries or illnesses.  I hope these have served very much to inspire you to improve your life and achieve your own epic accomplishments.  I’m willing to bet that we will never have a greater comeback story than in this episode.  This is the story of a wonderful 95-year-old woman named Lillian Berliner, a survivor of the Holocaust.  Her family led a normal life in a Transylvanian town that flip-flopped between Romanian and Hungarian rule until the Nazis came in and sent the town’s Jewish residents first to a crude ghetto and then to Auschwitz.  Lillian and her mother survived that notorious camp, then a labor camp, death marches, and finally the Bergen-Belsen death camp.  The horrors they saw and experienced are truly indescribable.  By the time they were liberated by the British Army, her mother weighed only 60 pounds.  Lili met her future husband Walter, an Austrian who had become a U.S. citizen and joined the U.S. Army, in postwar Germany and the two of them then built a life in America.  They lived in New York, raised two sons, and Lillian worked until she was 85 years old in the medical field helping others.  What is remarkable is how upbeat and vivacious she is despite her absolutely brutal experiences as a girl.  She has written a memoir called “And the Month was May,” that details her incredible life, and just as importantly, displays her amazingly positive and grateful attitude and loving personality.  Even though you might think that Holocaust stories are all very dark, this is a story of hope, love of hard work and America, family, and remembering and learning from the past.  I have a conversation here with her son Steve, who was my roommate at the University of Pennsylvania, who along with his wife Meryl, helped Lili put her story onto paper.  Interspersed throughout, you will hear clips from a conversation Steve had with Lili about her inspiring life.  This is a riveting episode, as is her memoir, which I encourage you very strongly to obtain from Amazon.  It’s less than 100 pages, so it’s no War and Peace, but it’s bound to have a deep impact on you.  I will also be posting on my social media several photos of Lili and her family as well as with members of the Belgian family whose father had aided Lili and other prisoners during the war and that through social media incredibly connected with Lili many years later, and they still keep in touch with each other to this day.  I’m very thankful that you are taking the time to learn from, and appreciate, this extremely important story.

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Steve Berliner
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Instagram @berlinersteve

Bill Stahl
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Instagram @stahlor