‘A wonderful way to honor him’

They did not paint, sculpt, compose, or write. You would think there was nothing about them to attract the attention of the "artists’ Schindler."

"I wonder why myself," said Jeanette Berman, who lives in a Brighton Gardens apartment in Saddle River. "But there is a word in Yiddish, ‘bashert.’ I think it was meant to be that he was able to help us."

In 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, Berman’s father, Louis Klein, lost his job as bookkeeper for a public utility. The little family, including Berman’s mother, Ida, moved on to Brussels, where they ran a small business that sold gift items. Jeanette, who was 12, learned French much faster than her parents did and handled the correspondence.

And then, in 1940, the Nazis overran Belgium. Men of German descent were ordered to register at the police station. Klein did as he was told — and was not released.

Jeanette and her mother, not knowing what had become of him but suspecting he had been taken to France, set off to try to find him. Each carrying one suitcase, they hitched a ride that took them to Limoges. Needing permits to enter Vichy France, they went to the police station to get them and were detained and held for three days, along with 50 other refugees, in a closed porcelain factory.

Then they were brought to Gurs, an internment camp near the city of Pau. "We were not physically abused," she wrote in an account of her experiences she provided The Jewish Standard, "but nevertheless were treated like prisoners. We were poorly fed and lots of people got sick." Berman lost 20 pounds in the two months she and her mother were imprisoned.

Eventually they got news of her father. He was in St. Cyprien, the same prison where Isi Canner was held, although their paths did not cross.

And they eventually were allowed to leave Gurs because they were able to show that they would not need public assistance.

They immediately went to Perpignan, to be close to Berman’s father. They were able to visit him in St. Cyprien, and to bring him food. Then, Berman wrote in her essay, "my father discovered that some of the French guards took bribes to let the men escape at night. He fled the camp."

The family, having heard that help might be found in Marseille, made their way there. While Berman’s father, a fugitive who would be arrested if caught, hid in their hotel room, she and her mother made the rounds of refugee organizations.

They heard about Fry "from the grapevine," she said, and met him at a café. "There were a lot of people around us," she recalled, "so he said to my mother and myself, ‘Let’s walk.’ We walked on a very busy street and he told us what he felt would be best for us. He told us to go to the Siamese consulate, with which he must have had a relationship to help people get out." And then he told them to go to the Portuguese and Spanish consulates.

The consulate of Siam (now Thailand), she explained in her essay, "issued visas. These were actually fakes and one could never enter that country, but the Portuguese and Spanish consulates recognized them as valid and issued transit visas through their respective countries.

"Now we faced the biggest problem: how to get my father out of France. For my mother and me it was not hard to obtain an exit visa, but for my father, being a fugitive, the story was different."

Fry instructed them to meet one of his aides at a café at the French-Spanish border town of Cereberes. That man, Berman said, "told us to go to a hotel across the street, go to sleep, and early in the morning, before light, take two suitcases, walk along the road, pass a cemetery, and start climbing….

"I don’t recall how long the climb took, but what I recall is that I walked in front of my parents and I came to a stone wall that was between three and four feet high. I shouted to my parents, ‘I think I found the border’ — and looking over the wall I saw a man working in a vineyard, and I called over, ‘Espana?’ And he answered, ‘Si.’"

From Spain the family went to Lisbon, where they applied for and were denied a visa to the United States.

After much traveling — including a brief and frustrating stay at Ellis Island — and a five-year stay in Ecuador, they finally came to live in the United States.

Berman and her late husband, Peter, lived in Maywood for 35 years and raised two sons there. She has five grandchildren — two living in Jerusalem — and, she said with a laugh, "three and a half" great-grandchildren. One and a half of those — the birth is due in August — are in Jerusalem.

Bashert? She wonders. "A stamp would be a wonderful way to honor him."