Hans Angress was a schoolmate of Anne Frank. He lost his father to the Auschwitz death camp. Then at age 15, he tore the yellow Jewish star off his shirt and went into hiding in occupied Holland, where he prayed for close to two years that no one would betray him to the Nazis.
Now 80, the Cotati resident and retired dairyman rarely passes on an invitation to speak with students about the Holocaust of the 1940s. The most startling part of his talk is when he says the next one could be even worse.
?I can foresee a larger holocaust on the horizon,? cautions Angress, a compact, balding man whose English still has a distinct tinge of his native German, though he?s been in this country 60-plus years.
When he speaks to young kids, he tells them, ?Be kind to each other and celebrate the differences.? If his listeners are college-age or close to it, the survivor of Hitler?s ?Final Solution? is more direct.
He confides to older teens and young adults that he fears mass killing will become ever more likely as the global population swells and developing nations, such as China, compete for resources long channeled predominantly to the United States and other industrialized nations.
Angress does have hope that another Holocaust can be avoided, and he emphasizes that hope to students. But he doesn?t sugar-coat his trepidation.
He notes global population has tripled over the course of his eight decades ? from more than 2 billion to more than 6 billion. When he imagines the population growth in the next 80 years, he shakes his head.
The Holocaust survivor believes that if mankind is to prevent competition for lifestyle and survival from spiraling into unprecedented bloodshed, enormous strides are required in population control and sustainable consumption.
Although he cheered President Barack Obama?s inaugural address last week, one sentence made him wince.
?We will not apologize for our way of life,? the new chief of state declared, ?nor will we waiver in its defense.?
Angress believes Americans? way of life cannot continue to include the consumption of a disproportionate portion of the Earth?s resources.
?Our standard of living has to come down,? he said.
His world view stems in part from his having been born a Jew in Berlin in 1928 as 39-year-old Adolf Hitler was rebuilding the Nazi Party. Angress? father, Ernst, supported his wife and three sons by operating a small bank.
When the Angress family joined the flight of German Jews from their increasingly hostile homeland in 1937, Ernst took along his money in the false bottom of a suitcase. He knew he was breaking a Nazi law.
?Jews were allowed to leave Germany, but they had to leave their money behind,? Hans Angress said at the Cotati townhouse he shares with his wife, Enola Wilson.
Angress and his parents and one of his brothers were accepted into Holland. Angress? older brother, Tom, managed to emigrate to America, where he would later join the army and fight with the Allies in Europe.
Hans Angress had just turned 12 when Germany invaded Holland in 1940. A year later, soldiers arrested his father for taking the money out of Germany. Hans never saw him again.
From 1940 to 1943, Angress and his mother, Henny, and brother, Fred, lived in Amsterdam under the constant scrutiny of German authorities who restricted the movements of Jews and required them to wear yellow stars.
Angress attended the same Jewish school as Anne Frank before the Frank family went into hiding there in July of 1942. It wasn?t until 1943 that Angress? mother decided she and her sons had to try to save themselves by separating and hiding.
Hans Angress, then 15, was taken in by a family involved with the Dutch underground. He left their home only rarely and carried a skillfully altered ID card that changed his surname to Andreas.
He said he?s certain that neighbors knew he was Jewish and in hiding, but no one turned him in.
Among his happiest days are the one in early May of 1945 when Canadian troops rolled into Amsterdam. And on Mothers Day in 1945, his brother the GI arrived in Amsterdam and all his family, except his father, who?d died in 1943 at Auschwitz, was reunited.
Angress? brother helped his family emigrate to America. Angress came to west Marin County to work for Strauss Dairy. He later became a partner, then left the dairy in 1968 and went into real estate sales and property management.
These days when he speaks to students, he?d like to say it?s unthinkable that inhumanity and genocide such as he witnessed as a boy could ever happen again. But he can?t.
?I do think at this point our problems are solvable, even though they are tremendous problems,? he said.
As part of the dying breed that outlasted Hitler?s purge, Angress encourages young people to believe that their resolve to conserve and reduce conflict over the Earth?s resources may help also to confine holocaust to the history books.
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