LEWYN, BERT, 1923-2016.
Bert and Esther Lewyn family papers, 1921-2009

Bert Lewyn was born Dagobert Lewin in Berlin, Germany, on April 2, 1923. He grew up during the Nazi party’s rise to power, and in 1942, at eighteen, he and his parents were taken by the Gestapo and separated. Lewyn was sent to work in the Gustav Genschow and Co., Weapons Factory (Berlin, Germany), and much later, he learned his parents were sentenced to die at the Trawniki (Poland) concentration camp. He was enslaved at the factory until 1943 when a non-Jewish worker warned him that the Gestapo were loading Jewish workers onto trucks and taking them away. That day he did not report to work and spent the next several years hiding at the homes of friends and strangers. In 1945 he was captured and imprisoned at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse prison (Berlin, Germany). He and a group of prisoners managed to escape through a tunnel they accessed with a key Bert Lewyn made from debris he found after a bombing occurred near the prison. He returned to the apartment of his friends, Jenny and Leo Lebrecht, and remained there for several weeks until Russian soldiers raided the apartment, signaling the end of the war. As Jewish people returned to Berlin, Bert Lewyn connected with his aunt Riva Gutman and, together, they emigrated to the Feldafing displaced persons camp (Bavaria, Germany), hoping to move onto Palestine. However, he lived there until 1949 when his great aunt Sarah Hene and great uncle Rabbi Tobias Geffen sponsored his emigration to Atlanta, Georgia. In Atlanta, he started the Lewyn Machinery Company and married Esther Sloan in 1951. They later had five children, and Bert Lewyn wrote his memoir On the Run in Nazi Berlin (2001) with the help of his daughter-in-law Bev Saltzman Lewyn.