Holocaust survivor shares her story at Bala Cynwyd school

These days, when Sipora Groen travels, it's work.

In between bar mitzvahs, graduations, and a Mother's Day reunion at the Jersey Shore, Groen has also been visiting local schools and congregations to tell her story of love and survival during the Holocaust.

Sipora Rodrigues-Lopes was a young nurse in Amsterdam when the German occupation began. She was one of only 30,000 Dutch Jews - one in four - to survive the Nazis.

The war took all her close relatives, her fiancee, her home, and her possessions, but also introduced her to the man who would become her husband.

"I'm 93. There must be a reason I'm getting that old. So I can talk to people," she said Thursday after addressing seventh graders at Bala Cynwyd Middle School. "You have no idea about it unless you've lived it. Nothing was normal."

The timing was perfect, as the students had just completed an assignment on narrative fiction and primary sources - with many selecting the Holocaust as their subject. After listening to Groen's story, they asked thoughtful questions and let the gravity of her tale soak in - her whole family gone; 17 hours a day in an unlit cellar; five years of running, danger, and death.

After the war, she married Nardus Groen - a member of the underground resistance who had saved her, and many others, from the Nazis. He became a rabbi, stationed in Suriname, Cincinnati, and, eventually, the Philadelphia area, where they raised five children.

Their descendants now number 26 and counting - a lineage that would not have existed if not for extraordinary luck and determination.

In her speeches as well as a book written by her youngest son, Groen tells of near-escapes, the goodness or depravity of strangers, and the soul's ability to endure in the face of utter tragedy.

"I still myself sometimes think, 'How did I go through it?' But I was young, and you have the courage to live. You wanted to live," said Groen, who speaks with a heavy Dutch accent and wears a Star of David around her neck.

Nardus Groen, who had been trained in the national guard and could pass as a gentile, at one point put Sipora on a gurney and wheeled her out of a hospital during a raid. Another time, he dressed as a police officer and pretended she was his prisoner.

He brought her to seven safe houses over the course of three years, including a farm in the tiny town of Lemerlerveld, where she would live in a damp, windowless concrete cellar 17 hours a day for a year and a half.

Nardus would visit when he could, but on several occasions he was arrested or detained by the Germans.

After Europe was liberated in 1945, he kept fighting, joining the Dutch marines to train at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and deploy in Japan.

When Sipora discovered she was pregnant - and when the two married - they were on different continents. With no family and Nardus overseas, the baby was all Sipora had. She named him after her father, Marcel. Later came Leo, Ruben, Deborah, and David.

Nardus died in 2007, and Sipora Groen now lives in Florida.

But this week, she is back in Philadelphia, admiring the blooming tulips and grateful that the weather is not aggravating her lungs, a lifelong legacy of her days in the cellar.

On Sunday, four generations of Groens will converge on a home in Ventnor, N.J., to celebrate their matriarch. And she, as always, will celebrate them.

"My oldest son, he saved really my sanity. I had something to live for," she told the class. "I have a beautiful family. For that I am very thankful."

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