Anne-Lise Stern (born Anneliese Stern: 16 July 1921 - 6 May 2013) was a French psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor.
Life
Family provenance and early years
Anneliese Stern was born in Berlin and then spent the first twelve years of her life growing up in Mannheim, to where her parents relocated soon after her birth. She grew up in a family atmosphere of intellectual creativity, in which the guiding vision was predominantly secular and left-wing.
Heinrich (later Henri) Stern (1893-1948), her father was a Freudian psychiatrist. He was also a passionate Marxist and secular Jew. Her mother, born Käthe Ruben (1893-1968), who worked as a nurse, also came from a politically committed Jewish family. Her maternal grandmother, Regina Ruben, was a militant feminist and Marxist, and a "companion in arms" to Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg. During her childhood both Anneliese's parents were members of the Social Democratic Party, while her grandmother Regina, to whom Anneliese later dedicated some of her written work, had joined the more recently established Communist Party.
Flight from Nazi Germany
The Nazis took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. Like populists through the ages, the Nazis had gained public support on the twin pillars of hope and hatred. The hatred, targeted on political opponents and Jews, became an underpinning of government policy very much more quickly than many had thought possible, and a few weeks after the Nazi takeover Heinrich Stern, by now serving on the local town council, was arrested. Three months later he was released without charge. On the day of his release the Sterns left Germany with their daughter, settling initially with relatives in Paris. Dr. Stern's secretary, Käthe Seitz, stayed in Germany and opposed the Nazis. She was killed by decapitation.
France and war
From Paris the Sterns moved to Blois in May 1933 and started to build new lives. Later they moved on to Lyon and from there to Nice. Anne-Lise quickly mastered the language and passed her school leaving exams ("Baccalauréat"). Towards the end of 1938 she and her parents were granted French citizenship. In the Autumn/Fall of 1939 France (and Britain) declared war on Germany: she had time to start her pre-university qualification year (PCB) at Tours, but in May 1940, after more than half a year of so-called phoney war (waiting), the German army invaded and rapidly over-ran the north of France. With millions of others, the Sterns hastily joined the exodus to the "free zone" in the southern half of the country which was governed for the next four years as an (initially semi-autonomous) puppet state from Vichy. By this time the Sterns were using French versions of their names. Henri Stern joined the French Resistance in the area round Albi. In 1943 Anne-Lise was living in Nice where she befriended Eva Freud, grand daughter to the iconic Sigmund Freud. The two of them worked together between November 1943 and March 1944 as secretaries at the municipal casino. Later in 1944 Eva died of sepsis following an abortion, having been denied hospital treatment. (Olivier Freud and his family, like the Sterns, classified as Jewish by the Nazis and by the Vichy authorities, were living as refugees in southern France.)
Further to the west, Anne-Lise's father, Dr Henri Stern, was able to focus of food and care for internees at Gurs. The camp had originally been set up to accommodate returning "internationalist" fighters from the Spanish Civil War and was now being used to hold political and race based refugees from Nazi Germany. There was none of the systematic killing that was becoming a feature of the so-called death camps in Germany, and security, at least before 1942, was chiefly dependent on the extremely isolated position of the camp. There were stories of inmates freely visiting the nearest village during the daytime and returning to their camp accommodation in the evenings. But conditions were basic and food was in short supply. Henri Stern was able to extract from the camp his own mother and five other women from Mannheim. He accommodated them in a house which he rented for the purpose at Gelos near Pau. He also collaborated with the Abbé Glasberg, a Resistance contact known to be working with the OSE and the Cimade, in order to try and rescue children who had been interned at Gurs.