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ND hero story: Film in works about Sterns efforts to save Jews from Nazis
‘ND hero story’: Film in works about Stern’s efforts to save Jews from Nazis
By Patrick Springer on Mar 8, 2017 at 8:25 p.m
FARGO -- Michel Stern’s boyhood journey from Nazi-occupied France to the United States started as a passenger hidden underneath a blanket while riding on a bicycle.
He was able to make his way to Casablanca and, after a long wait in a cramped apartment, boarded a Portuguese ship to the U.S., where his Jewish family was safe from the Holocaust that killed millions during World War II, including relatives who weren’t as lucky.
It was a life-saving trip made possible by Stern’s North Dakota uncle, Herman Stern, who was a prominent businessman and civic booster in Valley City, where he ran the Straus clothing store. ... “If it wouldn’t be for Herman Stern, I wouldn’t be here today, and that’s the truth,” Michel Stern said in a new documentary, “The Mission of Herman Stern,” that will debut this fall.
Herman Stern, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was posthumously awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, North Dakota’s highest honor, in 2014. He was known by some as the “angel of the prairie” and was credited with quietly helping more than 125 Jews escape persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941.
By Patrick Springer on Mar 8, 2017 at 8:25 p.m
FARGO -- Michel Stern’s boyhood journey from Nazi-occupied France to the United States started as a passenger hidden underneath a blanket while riding on a bicycle.
He was able to make his way to Casablanca and, after a long wait in a cramped apartment, boarded a Portuguese ship to the U.S., where his Jewish family was safe from the Holocaust that killed millions during World War II, including relatives who weren’t as lucky.
It was a life-saving trip made possible by Stern’s North Dakota uncle, Herman Stern, who was a prominent businessman and civic booster in Valley City, where he ran the Straus clothing store. ... “If it wouldn’t be for Herman Stern, I wouldn’t be here today, and that’s the truth,” Michel Stern said in a new documentary, “The Mission of Herman Stern,” that will debut this fall.
Herman Stern, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was posthumously awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, North Dakota’s highest honor, in 2014. He was known by some as the “angel of the prairie” and was credited with quietly helping more than 125 Jews escape persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941.