The Ageless Man: Lee Marnett

He is ageless.

It’s not because he chose his own birthday. Or because at over 80 years old he’s still exercising daily. And it’s not because he can still recall events that happened nearly 75 years ago with remarkable detail.

Lee Marnett is ageless because he is eternally optimistic. It’s because he employed more resolve before he was 10 years old than some men do in their entire lifetime. And beyond all else, when you look into his eyes, you see the curiosity of a child and the wisdom of the eldest sage simultaneously looking back at you.

(Print story by Jonathan Powell; video story by Shana Wilson)

It’s painful to think that those eyes have seen the lightless depths of humanity’s most visceral forms of malice. But Lee’s story isn’t about pain and suffering. It’s about redemption. And for all the horrors that were cast on innocent people, Lee did his part to try to make up for it with good. And still is.

For all the savagery he saw, he practices kindness. For being stripped of all he had, he offers charity. When all seemed entirely lost, he found hope. And to this day, he is still doing his best to help restore that balance.

Lee Marnett is many things. He is a business owner, husband, humanitarian, multilinguist, storyteller, and Packer fan. Most of these things you can simply tell just by his actions or short bits of conversation. But there’s one thing he probably won’t tell you unless you ask him.

Lee Marnett is a Holocaust survivor.

His house is only a short skip from Highway 43, just north of Milwaukee, but you’d never be able to tell standing outside of it. Between the quiet and the fence of scattered trees just across the street that hug a small pond nearby and obscure the world outside, you’d almost think you were in the country.

The front room is clean and bright, glowing from the sunlight that pours in through the large window that overlooks his front lawn. He sits on one of two big, cream, floral couches, stretched out comfortably with one long arm draped over the armrest, while the other rests beside him, waiting to help him illustrate a myriad of stories.

He looks out the window for a moment before beginning to speak, seemingly soaking up every bit of the beautiful day that sits just on the other side of the glass. The sound of his wife, punctuates the quiet as she moves around the kitchen.

“I was about 5 to 7 years old when the Nazis occupied Poland,” he says with a Lithuanian accent. “It was 1939.”

A World Ravaged

These are some of Lee’s earliest memories. The earliest of which are vague he admits, because what followed clouded many events around that time.

“It’s very fleeting. Your memories are stuck by what had happened as opposed to what happened previous.”

By 1939, the Nazis’ occupation of Poland was already impacting the region as ten of thousands of Polish Jews flooded into bordering Lithuania, seeking refuge from persecution. Despite a non-aggression pact signed in January between Germany and Lithuania, the Germans annexed the Klaipėda Region, a portion of southwestern Lithuania that was composed of an ethnic German majority, into East Prussia. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied and then annexed the country, along with the rest of the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia, in attempts to strategically prevent the Nazis from gaining access to its stronghold in Leningrad.

During this period, many non-Jewish Lithuanians participated in violent riots against the Jews, and by the summer of 1941, divisions of Einsatzgruppen, German killing units, along with their Lithuanian allies, began murdering Lithuanian Jews. From rural areas to central cities they moved, and by the end of 1941, they had forced many of the survivors into ghettos located in various major cities, including it’s capital, Vilnius, where Marnett and his family were taken.

“Naturally being Jewish, right away when they came in, they automatically gave us two or three hours (to gather belongings) and put us into a ghetto which is a room like this here,” he says, motioning to exemplify his point by sizing the front room with his hands, which is just enough to accommodate two good-sized couches, an armchair, and a coffee table at best. “With 50 people, and they slept on the floor.”

Most of those who made it to the ghettos suffered one of two fates, working in Nazi factories or death by execution.

“Whomever wasn’t working, they would take them into the Ponary Mountains and they’d shoot them. They had big graves. They would line them up…” he says, forming his hand into a gun and softly pulling his thumb down like a trigger. “And click. Knock them off. That was it.”

His father was given a work certificate that took him off to work in a soap factory, which provided, for the time being, at least some semblance of safety. But his parents still feared for his life and decided to sneak him out of the ghetto. A Polish farmer and close family friend from years before named Kazimir, agreed to take him back to his farm, at the risk of his own life, if discovered. Marnett stayed with Kazimir for 6 or 7 months, frequently hiding whenever people came near, in fear of being discovered by the Nazis or other sympathizers. He was only about nine years old.

“I was right above the oven. The oven is straight and there was a hole and I would be there in that hole. People would come in and I would be very careful not to sneeze, not to scratch, nothing. Got a few rats running around who became my friends.”

After the ghettos had largely been cleaned out, Kazimir took him in a wagon to the soap factory where his father worked, and from there, the two returned to Vilnius.

Lee pauses to look down after describing watching people being pulled from buildings to be moved or shot, and takes a breath.

He speaks very little of his mother, and whether this is due to his memories being vague from time, trauma, or sheer pain alone is uncertain. He merely implies that she was “gone.”

Shortly after returning to the ghetto, his father was taken to another camp and he was left with his uncle and his nephew. The three were soon moved to a camp in Estonia, where Marnett heard from others that his father was somewhere in another camp. Luckily for the two of them, an exchange was made and Marnett was sent to be with his father again.

By the time the two were once again transferred, this time to Stutthof, a concentration camp at the northern end of Nazi-occupied Poland, it was already the middle of the war.

“You died there.”

“The guys (German officers) were trying to hold onto us because otherwise they would go onto the Russian front,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to beat up people who had no weapons and are down on their luck than it is to go on the Russian front and get killed.”

And the Russian front was on the move. In January of 1944, the Red Army started its Winter Offensive, and began moving in on the Eastern front, causing the German camp authorities to begin evacuating prisoners, including Marnett and his father.

They were moved to Dachau, another concentration camp just outside of Munich in southern Germany. Marnett remembers being given “soup”, which was really just water with bits of bread added. It was just enough food to stay alive. They were again moved to a sub-camp of Dachau called Allach, which was better known for being a death camp.

“Allach was a camp they put you in, and like the elephants, you died there.”

“They decided from Allach to put us into railroad cars and they took us to a place where they would line us up and shoot us as the train was going from town to town.”

By this time, the American forces were encroaching on the German fronts and stopping many of the trains before they reached their final destinations.

“I believe it was General Patton who told the head commander of the train, ‘If you don’t like your life, you just put those guys right there and shoot them. Because when we come in, you’re going to be the first one we’re going to shoot.”

With the Nazi forces already in full retreat, there was little to do but comply. To save their own lives, the commander in charge and other officers removed parts from the train to stall their movement and provide an excuse to higher officers and the Gestapo as to why there was no progress.

“The head train guy, he would tell them he had to wait for parts to come from Berlin. He said they hadn’t arrived yet. Well, half of it was bombed in Berlin,” he says with a smile. “We (the Allies) were doing a good job now.”

That Was It, The Liberation

“As soon as this train was stopped, all of a sudden, the Americans were there and they were with Patton’s army. There were a lot of German troops with General Patton. And then we met the general himself.”

“When they came in, it was 1945, in April or May. And by that time they told us Germany was occupied and Hitler was dead. God, that was it.”

With his birth certificate lost or destroyed sometime during the war, he had no official birthday, so when it came time to get another, he got to choose his own.

“It was April 29 or May 1. That’s why I got my birthday. I didn’t have a certificate so I picked out May 5. That’s when the liberation came in. We just couldn’t believe it.”

The American troops brought in candy and Army surplus supplies to help revive the survivors that remained on the trains and in nearby camps. They were soon deloused and taken to other nearby camps and towns to re-establish. At the time of liberation, Marnett weighed only 75 pounds. His normal weight was 150.

Marnett and his father had survived for the time being, but his father’s luck had run dry shortly after the American liberation. After arriving in the small German town of Iffeldrof, his father took ill and was rushed to a hospital. It would end up being the last time they were together.

“When you take away your parents… You’ve been with your mom and dad and all that and all of a sudden… there you are. You’ve got to be by yourself and you’ve got to worry about…”

In between stories, he pauses to take a breath and collect his thoughts. His composure is profound, considering the circumstances, but the impact of speaking about the things he’s seen still seep through the cracks. And he’s honest about it.

“See every time I talk about it I can’t sleep at night,” he says letting out a large quick exhale that’s followed by a hard swallow. “It’s not easy. What I saw I can’t believe.”

As he says this, he holds his hands up near his face and winces, holding a pause for a moment until his face lightens, and with his hands still suspend in air, he makes a passing motion.

“It’s similar to the Hail Mary that Rodgers threw.”

There are two ways to disbelief. One that travels through despair, and the other, through exhilaration, buoyancy and light, but here, only one is a choice.

This is what makes Lee Marnett ageless. This is his balance. For all the evil in the world, there is good to be seen, touched, experienced and shared.

Even in emotionally intense moments where he recalls the gravity of watching those around him suffer, and suffer himself, he is somehow able to find some semblance of hope. Of resilience. Of blessing.

Even he admits that this mindset is what separated him from many others who also survived.

“People who were liberated, a lot of them wound up in insane asylums because they couldn’t take the bad against the good. At that time naturally I was too young, so it didn’t quite register in me. But throughout, I decided that I got a new life and by having a new life I’d like to make something with it. And the more I made with it, the better I felt. I kind of obliterated all the bad thoughts and came up with better thoughts.”

His life after the war saw a variety of things before he even came to America. He enrolled in a trade school in Munich where he improved his German, traveled to Italy in attempts to get to Israel, only to find the gates were not open before even arriving, then returned to northern Italy and stayed for seven months just outside of Milan.

At around 14 or 15 years old, he made his way back to Germany, this time to a camp in Stuttgart and worked for a while before making his way to Bremerhaven, a German port city, where he and many others were put on an Army ship and brought to America by the United Nations.

He was taken to an orphanage in the Bronx, and offered the chance the come to either Milwaukee or San Diego. Encouraged by the large German community that was established, he chose Milwaukee, where he landed at another orphanage on 21^st and Vliet. While he attended high school, he used his ability to speak German to attain his first few jobs, initially, at a grocery store, working under Max Kohl, the father of former Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl, where he improved his English enough to get a job at the A&P Bakery.

After graduating, Marnett was adopted by the Ugents, a couple who bought him in and treated him like one of their own.

“They took me in as a child, I was no different than they were. I was with them all the time. That kind of helped me stabilize, you know, because I never had a family. That kind of straightened me out.”

By that time, he had enough money to buy the Schwinn bicycle he had been wanting for years, giving him not only transportation, but also freedom.

“I was like a free bird and liking that. But I was saying to myself, I gotta get something. Make something. Do something.”

When he reached 19 years of age, he was ready to do that something, so he started his own office supply business, and over 50 years, grew it to 12 employees, traveled the world in the process, made himself enough to retire on, and built a house on five acres in River Hills, complete with a sun-lit front room, and two big, cream floral couches, on which he now sits, at about 82 years old.

Although he says it’s often difficult to discuss, he knows sharing his story helps others as much as it helps him.

“I don’t like to keep it in me. At first, yeah, there was a lot, sitting in me. Maybe it’s hidden. But you’ve got to let it out because you get consumed by it and that doesn’t let you do anything. You become a prisoner in your own mind.”

“You might as well let people know what life was so history doesn’t repeat itself. The idea is you don’t want to see that again. People realize how bad things were and that you were a witness to it, lived through it.”

But of course, he believes that it’s more than just being there, just sharing his experiences. He’s learned to take those experiences and enrich others’ lives because even with everything he’s been through, there are still people who are less fortunate. Because of this, he often donates to charity and encourages others to do the same.

“Participate and help people out who are not as fortunate as you are. By that I get a great joy and I’m able to, with God’s help, help others. That’s what life is all about. Being a charitable, honest person.”

“Hopefully the younger generation will think a lot of the new world or whatever else is coming to them because the greatest generation there was handed it out to us, and we have to pass it on to the next generation. We can only hope that life will get better, that the times will get better, and that the people will treat each other with respect. That’s the main thing.”

This is the final reason why Lee Marnett is ageless. Because even though the stories he tells exist in a specific place and time in history, the things he’s learned are priceless, the kindness he chooses to dispense is endless, and the words he chooses to share, they are timeless.