Alfons Sperber was only 11 years old when the Nazis marched into Vienna in September 1938, upending his family’s life and the lives of his Jewish neighbors. Great-grandson Eli Siesser was also 11 years old when he first interviewed Papa for his fifth-grade immigration project at Yavneh Academy. Now 97 and a member of the Young Israel of Hillcrest, Sperber shared: “I am so grateful that my story was recorded so that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren can learn from it. I want them to know that in my darkest moments, my faith kept me hanging on. G-d was at my side, protecting me at every turn.”
Nearly five years after his son Eli’s initial interview with Sperber, Teaneck grandson Ron Siesser published the full account of his grandfather’s wartime experiences, geared to teenage and young-adult audiences, entitled Live and Be Counted: A Boy’s Heroic Tale of Survival, Faith, and Family, which rose to Amazon’s Number One New Release for the month of October. With the publication of the historical fiction account, Siesser has fulfilled a long dream to share his grandfather’s story in an accessible way. “Many people have expressed their dream to write about their own family history or regret they never did. I was fortunate to be able to tell ours,” Siesser said.
The title of the work alludes to Sperber’s Hebrew name, Reuven. In his blessing to the tribe of Reuven in the Sinai Desert prior to the Israelites’ entry into the land, Moshe Rabbeinu blesses them by saying, “May Reuven live and may his people be counted in the number” (Deuteronomy 33:6), a message to both survive and thrive during life’s most difficult challenges.
In addition to being a welcome addition to the precious firsthand accounts of dwindling Holocaust survivors, the new work will serve as inspiration for Yavneh Academy’s 2025 eighth-grade Holocaust production, now in its 24th year. Rabbi Shmuel Burstein, Jewish history instructor and producer of the renowned culminating play at Yavneh, participated in the initial interview of Sperber by great-grandson Eli five years ago. Through his targeted framing of questions, he was able to jog Sperber’s memory to include as many events as he could recreate. Impressed by the individual and the story, Rabbi Burstein will be creating the April production around Sperber’s story. “With G-d’s help, I hope to attend the performance in person,” Sperber said.
Sperber’s experiences include his fleeing the clutches of the Nazis from his native Vienna, living through several close calls in France, and crossing over the Alps to find haven in a refugee camp in Switzerland. While his own father was taken prisoner and cunningly escaped an Auschwitz-bound train, Sperber, his mother, and his sister improvised a loosely assembled plan that his father devised to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. “It’s been a privilege to be part of a story that passes down the history of our family, and I hope readers will find Papa’s story inspiring, just as I did,” said Eli, currently a sophomore at TABC.
Throughout his ordeal, Sperber experienced long, lonely, and frightening separations from his family. One particularly painful separation was when he was hidden in a Christian monastery in southern France, disguised as a monk. Despite his alien surroundings, Sperber, who became bar mitzvah during the war, secretly donned t’filin every morning before attending mandatory Christian services. Fortuitously, he was taken under the wing of a sympathetic Christian abbot who took upon himself instructing the boy in Hebrew texts and lovingly served as an “abba” until Sperber was miraculously reunited with his own father.
After the end of the war in 1945, the Sperber family remained in France until 1948, while waiting for visas to America, which were slow in coming. Their sponsorship came from a business colleague who earlier tried but failed to bring them to America in 1938 before the horrors began. The memoir includes recently discovered pictures from the refugee camp in Switzerland featuring a tall, 18-year-old Alfons and his seven-year-old sister Helgi, among many other fortunate young survivors.
Currently, Live and Be Counted by Ron Siesser, published by Austin Macauley Publishers, is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book retailers. It is soon to be available at local Judaica stores.
By Pearl Markovitz
