Gentleness Wins

​Peter Daniels early life was a series of nightmares, any one of which would cause you to shudder and then be amazed that he overcame so much to live the life he has lived. Had his life ended tragically in his youth, or had he become a criminal, we would with some justification say, ‘we understand how his life took the wrong turn.’
 
This letter is focused on Peter’s remarkable triumph of gentleness over evil and what I believe is the incredible strength it took him to shape a rich life out of less than nothing. I write this on what would have been my son Miles’ 29th birthday. Seven years ago, I started writing a kind of birthday letter to a son-no-longer-here/letter-of-encouragement for those coping the aftermath of losing someone you love. My sister Karen has been friends with Peter’s wife Joan for more than 30 years and I’ve seen them socially over the years at my sister’s home. I had an opportunity to sit with Peter a few weeks ago to ask him some questions about his life beyond what has been documented as one of very few child survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. His transcendent attitude offers so much for many suffering from grief for both its simplicity and hard fought truth.
 
Imagine being born a young Jewish boy in Berlin, 1936. Add to this that you are born to an unwed mother and your father’s family has already fled the Nazi regime by moving to Shanghai, China. Your mother spent most of her youth as the unwanted step-daughter, experiencing the cruelties that went along with this fate. She brought this behavior into her raising of you in some mix of her own poor parenting skills, experiencing cruelty herself, living as an outsider in her own land and seeing you as a reminder of her now regretted liaison.
 
You’re beaten regularly and live in a very curtailed world due to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of racial purity that pushed Jews out of professional jobs, kept you out of public schools, playgrounds, theaters, museums, restaurants, buses and trains. Even as a child, you had to wear the yellow Star of David to point out your Jewishness to a society that insulted and cursed you.
 
In 1941 your grandfather dies. His wife and her two daughters are deported to Auschwitz where they are never heard from again. Your mother, Hilde, has papers showing that her mother was born a Christian, converting to Judaism when she married. She has papers showing that she is a “mischlinge” - someone having Christian blood in her. This provides a stay from the both of you being deported to the death camps. She gets a job as a seamstress making uniforms for German soldiers. Alone in Berlin, you need to stay in your apartment unattended and with the threat to not cause problems. Alone with your dreams, you see the park you can’t play in, the children you can’t be friends with, and the life you can’t live.
 
In 1943, you answer the door to two men dressed in Nazi uniforms. The freedom from camps for mischlinges was over. All Jews in Germany were to now go to camps. They wait with you until your mother arrives from work. You are packed into cattle cars and shipped off to Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia where you will mark your seventh and eighth birthdays, leaving just before your ninth. Theresienstadt was a holding camp for some prisoners and also a type of clearing house used for sending most to the death camps. Your mother’s skill as a seamstress gets her a job mending German uniforms and you do menial labor along with other children. Hungry, you often take the risk of scrambling out at night to get fallen potatoes by the tracks.
 
The camp was the Nazi’s showcase of their “humane” treatment of their prisoners. You were lucky to not be one of the 30% of the population struck down by the opportunistic diseases endemic to filthy conditions. Typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and other killers missed you. Lice were everywhere. The clothes packed for the stay were taken on the first day. The only shoes you had during this time needed to have the front cut out so your feet could grow. Exposed as they were, wearing worn out clothing with feet partially uncovered, you didn’t succumb to the cold winters. You also were able to avoid being one of the “happy” children used in the Nazi propaganda film about the camp. They were all shipped to Auschwitz after the film was made.
 
Nearly 15,000 children lived in your camp. By some estimates, less than 150 were alive at the end of the war. Somehow, you were one of them when the Red Cross, then Soviet Army liberate the camp.
 
Your difficulties don’t end here. Migrating to a Displaced Persons Camp with your mother, you enter a school where German children beat you up, blaming you for the deaths of their fathers, uncles and brothers during the war. After three weeks, your mother pulls you out of school. She beats you in camp and sees you as a burden in her new marriage to another survivor.
 
In 1947, you move with your new family to America where all of you live in the lower east side of Manhattan. The beatings continue and you run away several times only to be returned by the police. At the age of 14 you run away for good and begin a series of dead-end jobs working in a dairy farm, as a ranch hand, truck driver, dishwasher, carnival hand and lifeguard. Sometimes sleeping in a Greyhound Station, sometimes on a park bench and sometimes in a bed. Never secure that comfortable times would last.
 
Who could blame you if you had taken to a life of crime? Nothing has been easy and the basis for a moral core many of us develop in our youth was robbed from you by the horrors of home and the war. Yet, as you told me, you always managed to stay on the straight and narrow during this time with the modest goal of, “having a place to lay my head, a loaf of bread under my arm, and a job.” You found entertainment in simple things and found adult role models in two men. The iconic Marlboro Man of the billboard ads around the country who was a loner content with the simple life, and the owner of a horse ranch in Texas where you worked for several months. The ranch owner convinced you to try and make it right with your mother. How was he to know that your mother’s first words to you were, “We don’t have room for you.” At 16, back in New York City, you said you never felt more alone. What could have been a new beginning turned out to be another tragedy.
 
Somehow you isolated these terrible periods that were combining as your life history into the “phases” that you would make it through. No big plans for a better life, or goals of conquering these trials, choosing simple endurance instead. “One day at a time” was as far as you wanted to see and it helped you get through these times. You always had where you came from in the back of your mind – Nazi Germany and the concentration camp. You explained it to very few people but carried it as a companion. This was something you knew you could never escape from yet something you could move beyond.
 
You began to see a future for yourself when you were in the Navy. From there you got a bachelor’s, then master’s degree. You began your career, got married, had a child, then divorced. Still going “one day at a time.” Forty years ago you married again and began your new phase that includes meeting again with your mother, telling your story to new generations at the Museum of Tolerance, sharing your American Dream on PBS, and gathering with your Break Fast group of men. Life continued to have its struggles and demons from the past but the good days were adding up to a better life with Joan.
 
You have bent the violence, hate, despair, fear and anger into a gentleness that everyone sees immediately. You somehow have stilled the war within you and have found a peace. You are Peter Daniels.
 
Paul Tillich, a theologian who left Nazi Germany because of his views, wrote, “suffering takes people beneath the business of life and reminds them that they are not who they thought they were.” Author David Brooks wrote that this suffering helps you discover that the, “basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew.”
 
Peter never had the luxury of building a happy artifice around his life that could have been destroyed by the violence, loneliness and chaos that were constantly in his early life. He was almost always in an unsafe, crumbling world where the most primary needs of food, shelter and belonging were never guaranteed. By looking only at getting through today, he managed to string together many days until he could trust himself to look farther ahead. Hope wasn’t in a distant future for him but in the hope that he could get through this day, multiplied by two decades. He constructed a new life with love, peace and security out of two decades of ashes I think would have suffocated many of us.
 
To me, Peter is a wonderful light of persistence in the world. He quietly moved ahead toward his future and away from what would have been the easier choice to be destructive. He remarkably found a better way forward from all he had known and experienced. Many of us are fortunate to find a path forward that leads to repair and a better life than what life’s tragedies would dictate. Peter’s story is one path that used immediate goals and an underlying drive to avoid troubles when loftier goals would not have been conceivable. Peter’s life found hope for the future when there wasn’t any reason to assume it would find hope’s reward. Peter’s is a remarkable life and lesson. His past is still his companion, but it doesn’t dictate his world.
 
I hope his story brings you courage in your life if hope seems lost to you. “Peter Daniels’ American Dream” you’ll see a short eight minute PBS video that will give you hope and a sense of the gentleness of his wonderful soul that runs deep and strong.