Alyce's storyFormer dancer still carries happy, sad memories of days when she helped save JewsBARBARA YOST
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 Dancer, singer and actress Alyce Sterling, then known as Alyce Simone, is seen here during a personal appear-ance at New York's St. Regis Hotel around 1945. Photo courtesy of Alyce Sterling |
"She was adorable," Sterling says.
Every Shabbat, Sterling would go to Hannelore's house and turn on lights for the family. One night in 1928, Hannelore's family invited Sterling, who was also 5 then, to a Passover seder at their luxurious home. The family was in the rubber business and had earned considerable wealth in the years before World War II and the Nazi takeover of Germany. After dinner, Hannelore's grandfather enthralled little Alyce with stories about Judaism, and the girl sat spellbound.
"It was very moving," says Sterling, who was born in Luxembourg to a French father and German mother and raised Catholic.
Sterling's family moved to another neighborhood in Trier-Mosel shortly after that night, and she lost touch with her classmate. But an affection for Jewish tradition had been planted in her heart that would last a lifetime - and even lead her to save lives when the Nazi atrocities began.
 Growing up in Germany, Alyce Sterling helped save Jews from deportation by the Nazis in the 1930s. The former dancer, singer and stage actress now lives in Glendale with her pal Domino. |
On a Sunday afternoon, with music from classic operas playing on the stereo, she shares stories from the war years, captivating her listener as Hannelore's grandfather once did her. Her stories, too, are moving.
Alyce Simone was born to dance. At age 5 and a half, she began lessons in classical ballet and showed talent from the beginning. She would become a prodigy in musical theater.
One afternoon in 1935, she came home from school, grabbed her leotard and slippers and ran down the street to ballet class. As she passed the home of her neighbors, the Levys, a suitcase fell at her feet, dropped from a window.
Someone shouted from the house, "They're all packed."
"I didn't know what was happening," Sterling says.
The Levys were wealthy Jews who owned two department stores in Trier-Mosel. As Sterling watched the elderly couple crying in front of their house, German men in brown shirts pilfered their belongings, piling up goods in the yard - clothing, paintings, kitchenware.
The young girl, who had often danced for guests at the Levy home, couldn't comprehend the sight.
Sterling's mother tried to explain that the Nazis were evicting Jews from Germany, and the Levys were in trouble.
"They were my benefactors," she says. "They were like my mother and father."
She hatched a plan, calling on her Uncle Tony, a piano mover for the local orchestra, for help. The musicians' next performance was in Luxembourg. When they left, two huge wooden harp cases left with them, containing not harps, but Mr. and Mrs. Levy, smuggled to safety.
Witness to tragedy
Though Sterling attained great success in her dance and singing career over the next decades, even performing for President Dwight Eisenhower and befriending his wife, Mamie, her life has also been marked by tragedy.
When she was 12, her father committed suicide, a pain she says will never go away. During the war, her first husband, a renowned opera singer who spoke eight languages, was killed in Paris by Nazis who wrongly believed he was with the Underground. Sterling's daughter, Heidi, was just an infant.
During the war, Heidi was kept safe by a foster family who lived on a farm far from the bombs. When Sterling remarried, her new husband adopted the girl.
Triumphs and friendships still trigger old emotions. Seldom does Sterling allow herself to travel into that distant past, dredging up memories that can sadden her.
"Sometimes not only does it hurt, but I have had trouble sleeping since then," she says. "Sometimes I have nightmares."
Krystallnacht - the "night of broken glass" in November of 1938 - is still vivid in her mind. One by one, friends disappeared over the succeeding years and never returned. Some, she says, escaped the country with the help of gentile friends.
Sterling says most of her friends were Jews, many of whom performed in the theater. One friend, a conductor, perished in a concentration camp. When her second husband told her he was Jewish, just after he had proposed marriage, she asked him sincerely, "What's that got to do with it?"
"There was no difference," she says. "I didn't know a difference between Jews and non-Jews."
Sterling considered herself stateless, never taking German citizenship and saddened by the persecution of people whom she held so dear. She was never devout in her Catholicism, but she once visited the Vatican after the war while back in Europe.
Living in New York after the war, she treasured a friendship with a rabbi there who became her confidante. After his death, she never again spoke of her war memories, she says - until now.
Before the war ended, Sterling was living and working in Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia. Her landlady, Wanda Kopp, had worked for the Neumann family, whose patriarch was the local district attorney. He had two grown daughters, including one five years older than Sterling, named Kay.
The Neumanns escaped to South America, leaving Kay behind in Germany. From time to time, the Nazis would arrest her and threaten to send her to a concentration camp. Sterling noticed that Kopp would disappear coincidentally for days at a time. She finally discovered that her landlady, once the Neumanns' nanny, would visit official police headquarters and claim Kay was her illegitimate daughter, sparing her from imprisonment.
Kay, who lived in Berlin, came to see Sterling perform in an operetta and was impressed with her talents. The two women became fast friends.
But the SS was ever on Kay's trail. One day, Sterling heard the sounds of boots on the staircase of her apartment building and opened the door to police armed with machine guns, asking for Kay Neumann. Someone had recognized her at the theater as Nazi prey.
"She's not here," Sterling told them, knowing Kay was visiting Wanda Kopp. She got word to Kay, and Kay escaped through Kopp's attic and fled to Berlin, safe at last when the war began to wind down and liberation was in sight.
Sterling had been out of work since Joseph Goebbels closed down German theaters in 1944. She took a job working for a doctor, entertaining patients in a veterans' hospital and helping them to write letters.
With the Russian invasion of Germany, the doctor advised Sterling to leave Allenstein, so she moved to Berlin and roomed with Kay and Kay's little dog, Schnups.
The Russians proved as fearsome as the Nazis, with a reputation for assaulting German women, Sterling says, and chasing people from their homes. Kay and Sterling once found themselves in just such homeless straits but were rescued when Sterling recognized an old friend of her late husband, a Ukrainian. He hid them from Russian soldiers, found them food and a burned-out apartment where they could hide. They made it a home.
Life brightens after war
In time, theaters re-opened, and Sterling worked again. So did Kay, a skilled dress designer whose sketches still hang in Sterling's Glendale apartment. Americans replaced Russians in post-war Germany.
On a subway one day, Sterling attracted the attention of three American soldiers, who teased her, called her fraulein and followed her back to the apartment. They had been shopping on the black market, and when they met Kay with cartons of cigarettes and boxes of chocolates, "she was in seventh heaven," Sterling says.
One of the soldiers, a kind young man named Calvin Sterling, helped Kay write letters that eventually located her mother and brother in South America. Her father had since died. Her sister and brother-in-law had been killed at Auschwitz.
When Eisenhower visited Berlin after the war, Sterling was dancing with a theater company that performed for the general and his wife. Several years later, when Ike was president, and Sterling was starring in "My Fair Lady" in Washington, D.C., she again met the Eisenhowers, and Mamie remembered her. They became acquainted, and Sterling sent her hat-maker to outfit the first lady.
"Mamie loved hats," Sterling says. "Not that she looked so good in them, with those bangs!"
In 1948, Alyce Simone married Calvin Sterling, and the couple moved to New York. Kay Neumann planned to move to South America to be with her family. Sterling has lost track of her old friend, who would be 80 now.
Alyce and Calvin Sterling moved to Arizona from Long Island when he retired from his engineering job in 1991. He died three years ago.
Sterling shares one last memory from the war years. It's one with a happy ending, an epilogue to the story of the Levys.
While performing in New York soon after her marriage, Sterling worked with a pianist named Martin Roman, a Jew from Vienna. He mentioned one day that he had been in a holding camp in Holland for Jews on their way to Israel. One elderly couple there was from Trier-Mosel. Did Sterling know a couple by the name of Levy?
Remembering the moment, Sterling stops to wipe tears from her eyes.
"It gives me chills," she says. "They got out."
