Childhood Betrayed and Regained

When he was six, Fred Lessing ’58 (1936–2025) was hidden from the Nazis. As an adult, he made the spirit of the child a way of life and healing.

In the 1970s there was a summer camp in Michigan called Walden, a retreat for the clients of a Detroit-area psychotherapy practice and their families. It was a place where grownups could be kids, doing arts and crafts, building little boats, dancing and singing—plus group therapy. And every morning, just as people were waking up in their cabins and tents, sweet music would float through Walden as a flutist wandered the grounds, gently ushering in the day.

The flutist was a man named Alfred “Fred” Lessing ’58 (1936–2025). He ran Walden, along with his wife, Rosalyn (who went by Roz). He was a survivor of the Holocaust who became an academic philosopher of musical esthetics and, later, a psychotherapist. Today, the fusion of music, therapeutic help, and play that typified Walden—and Lessing’s whole approach to helping others—reads as “very Seventies.” But in this case it was an authentic expression of one survivor’s soul.

From 1942 to 1945, between the ages of six and nine, Fred Lessing took refuge in the homes of unwitting gentile “saviors” in the Netherlands in an elaborate plan for his survival cooked up by his resourceful mother. The most important through-line in Lessing’s life, say his children Shana and Benjamin Lessing, was childhood: childhood remembered, childhood regained as a mode of healing, and childhood betrayed.

“I define the Holocaust in terms of the destruction of children and childhood,” he once wrote. “The Holocaust represents the fear and hatred of . . . childlike innocence and freedom of spirit—then and now.”

“There were many ways in which he was childlike,” Shana recalls, “and even a bit juvenile. But he was also simply playful. He appreciated the freedom and naïve joy of childhood and looked for that, I think, in his life. But he was also handy. He had a chainsaw and cut down trees on our land in northern Michigan. As I said in my eulogy for him in April, ‘He was a hippie, Holocaust survivor, therapist, flute-playing, self-centered sweetheart who was a little obsessed with duct tape, epoxy resin, and high-gloss varnish.’”

Hiding in Plain Sight

The life of this complex man began in 1936. When he was four, living with his secular Jewish family in Delft, the Germans invaded Holland. Two years later, on October 23, 1942, the head of Delft’s Jewish council, a family friend, called to tell the Lessings that they were scheduled for “transport” immediately.

Six-year-old Fred was upstairs playing with a wind-up train when his mother, Engeline, swung into action. She gathered the family—her husband Nardus; Fred; and his older brothers, Ed and Attie. “Her message was: ‘There is total and extreme danger, you must do exactly what we tell you, and you must trust no one except us and those that we say you can trust,’” Fred told a University of Michigan interviewer in 1993.

They were leaving the house on the pretext of visiting neighbors. To a handyman who was fixing their furnace Engeline said they would return in a few minutes.

“He kept on working and we walked out of that house and never came back.”

Having evaded capture in Delft, Fred’s first stay was with his Amsterdam grandfather, who made him wear the yellow star that the Nazis imposed on Jews, and even enrolled him in a Jewish school.

Alarmed at this exposure of her son’s identity, Engeline took Fred back and hatched a plan: she rang the doorbells of complete strangers or people referred to her by friends, posing as a gentile mother from the coastal province of Zeeland whose family lost their home to flooding when the invading Germans bombed the region’s dikes. She offered to pay the family to mind Fred or his brothers for a few weeks while she went looking for permanent housing. Then she would reappear, to comfort and/or reclaim Fred or a sibling, and move them on to another unwitting host family.

Fred said he had to become “the cutest, sweetest, most helpful, polite and well-behaved little Christian kid in the whole world so that no one would ever suspect or betray me.”

He contracted diphtheria in the first of these temporary foster homes. His mother arranged for him to be treated, and during one of her visits she asked him if there was anything he wanted.

“I would like a head on my bear,” was his reply.

In the flight from their home in Delft, the one possession Fred had taken with him was a diminutive teddy bear, one he later called “the only friend I had” during his ordeal. It had been decapitated by a dog. Engeline used material from the pocket of one of Fred’s jackets to give it a new head, and the reconstituted teddy would later play a pivotal role in his life, private and public.

Survival—and America

As the war dragged on into 1944, Engeline and Nardus decided that, come what may, the family should reunite. At this point Fred was living in the southern city of Tilburg. When he contracted pneumonia there, Engeline got him into a hospital, aided by a “good” doctor—one who, after examining him, agreed to keep the fact that he was circumcised a secret.

But then disaster struck. Engeline was arrested by a Dutch Nazi policeman who happened to be an expert on forged documents. He spotted her ID as fake, and she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

She had arranged earlier for the family to reunite in rural Holland by renting a tiny cottage on the land of a former employer, and the Lessing males made it there. Until the area was liberated by the Canadian army in April 1945, they lived by begging for food from local farmers. “That was a glorious time for me,” Fred remembered, “because my wandering had come to an end and I was with my family, except for my mother.”

Meanwhile, Engeline had done the miraculous: talked her way out of a concentration camp. Part of Bergen-Belsen housed Jews the Nazis hoped to trade for German POWs. Engeline claimed she was an American citizen “and got out by being exchanged,” Fred told his interviewer. “My mother was a very powerful person who could make you believe almost anything.”

In 1948, the Lessing family, intact and alive, emigrated to the United States and settled in Massachusetts. When the time came to go to college, Fred chose Carleton and a philosophy major, graduating in 1958. While at Careton, he met Marcy Enrietto ’56, who would become his first wife, and the couple eventually adopted two sons, Aaron and Joshua.

After earning a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1962, he joined the faculty of Oakland University in suburban Detroit in 1962 and, three years later, assumed leadership of Charter College. This was an experimental unit in the school whose main focus, according to a 1971 course catalogue, was “not a prescribed body of subject matter, but rather the process of inquiry itself. . . . The College also welcomes innovative teaching methods and student participation in the making of College policies.”

It was a very ’60s idea and milieu. Charter students lived together on two dorm floors and engaged in intense discussions of the Civil Rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and other live issues. Fred’s marriage had ended and he had begun a relationship with Roz, another member of the Oakland philosophy faculty. The pair welcomed students into the farmhouse they shared, one of whose attractions was a room that students could paint, and repaint, any way they chose. “I don’t know if you would use the word ‘be-in’ for those sessions,” says Shana Lessing. “But I think possibly hallucinogens were involved.”

“A Hug Was Not Inappropriate”

The lively college world they lived notwithstanding, Lessing and Roz eventually grew dissatisfied with academic life. “You were always talking, reading, thinking about human experience, reading about it, theorizing about it,” he told an interviewer in 2013, “but I wanted to be closer to experience itself.”

While still teaching, and before marrying Roz in 1972, Fred and Roz had been in couples therapy at a clinic called the Community Psychological Resources Institute (COPRIN), run by a humanistic psychologist named Louis Glass. It was a time of experimental therapy—gestalt, primal scream, and many other modes. At COPRIN there were marathon sessions, sometimes going on for three or four days. “I don’t think it took very long before COPRIN became their main community,” says Shana. “And they left academia and went back to school for psychology.” Glass had established the Walden summer camps before the Lessings arrived, but the pair soon took them over—with Fred’s peripatetic flute solos as part of the healing. Soon the couple built their own therapy practice.

Ted Braude is a retired psychotherapist who was an Oakland University student, a client of Fred’s, and a lifelong friend. He describes Fred and Roz as therapists whose practice was “fundamentally rooted in love. It was palpable. Fred didn’t miss a beat. It was a period of time in therapy when warmth and touch were part of what therapists would do with people. A hug was not inappropriate.”

Bear and Fred

Then, one day in 1987, Fred’s brother Attie, who had taken the Hebrew name Abba, called him on the telephone. He was looking at a catalogue of B’nai B’rith Holocaust materials, and saw a picture. He was sure Fred was in it.

It’s a picture of a roomful of children, six or seven years of age, each wearing a yellow star. In the front row, second from the right, sits a tousle-haired boy who Abba was sure was Fred. He’s wearing a fuzzy jacket. Fred obtained a copy of the photo, examined it carefully, and realized that the jacket was made of the same material as the head of his teddy bear, the friend of his exile, which he had kept for 40 years.

It was, he soon realized, a photo of the children in the Jewish school he had attended in Amsterdam before his mother took him back under her wing; before his good-Christian-child period; before she made the bear’s new head from the jacket’s pocket.

“It felt to me,” Fred said, “as though the reason this picture is appearing in books—because shortly thereafter it did—is because it symbolizes all those children who were killed. But, I felt, ‘Wait a minute, I’m still here, goddamn it . . . I’m still alive, you bastards!’ I felt a need to speak for these kids . . . and I’ve been struggling with that ever since, because I don’t—it is so incredibly difficult to find the words.”

Fred found them. Along with other child survivors of the Holocaust, including “hidden children” like himself, he was recovering floods of memories. He connected with other child survivors, interviewed the members of his family and recorded their recollections. He spoke to organizations around the country, always bringing his teddy bear, grown shabby and threadbare, with him.

“I made a decision a couple of years ago,” he told his University of Michigan interviewer, “that whenever I deal with my Holocaust experience, he will come along with me. Because this is the only friend that I had during those years, and I was just a tiny little kid and there were times of incredible, unspeakable aloneness and terror.”

Fred’s bear eventually wound up on permanent loan to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as part of an exhibit about the Holocaust’s impact on children, and Israeli author Iris Agaman made the bear the point of view and voice of a children’s book, translated from Hebrew as Bear and Fred: A World War II Story. The story of Bear and Fred was also included in Keith Famie’s 2021 film, Shoah Ambassadors.

In an epilogue to the book, Bear says, “[Fred and I] have a very strong and special connection. One knows exactly what the other thinks and feels, as if we were one person. You know what? Maybe we are one and the same. Maybe we always were.”

In understanding the life and the humane values of this essentially apolitical and non-religious man, whose early childhood was turned into a terrified masquerade, we probably can’t do better than to reflect on this statement of his faith, which his son Benjamin read at his funeral:

“I have a great fear and hatred for the rationalization of pain and oppression in the name of some (grown-up’s) conception of what is good, or holy, or necessary, or noble, or moral. No belief, no value, no dogma, no principle—no abstraction—is ever more important than the freedom and dignity of a child. If we do not learn this from the Holocaust, we learn nothing.” 

Jon Spayde writes about education, psychology, medical issues, art, and craft for a number of Twin Cities and national publications.