Grace Upon Grace

The Remarkable Story of Lisa Greenberg

By Gary Bouchard, Photography by Jeff Dachowski

Imagine late one night you find yourself captivated by one of those classic black and white war films playing on television. A World War II drama in which the beautiful young heroine is trying to elude the watchful eyes of the Nazis and escape from Germany with her family. Her mother’s Jewish ancestry has put the family in peril as Hitler’s persecutions have intensified. Near the French border, they are kicked out of their hotel. The young heroine finds herself out in the street, her mother’s Jewish Identification Card in one pocket and clutching a revolver in the other. She hears gunshots and turns to see a truckload of soldiers when suddenly…

When suddenly you realize that this is not fiction. You have traveled up a narrow, wooded road and are sitting in a cozy living room in Charlestown, New Hampshire, listening to Lisa Greenberg tell her life story. Lisa sits in an easy chair beneath a large crucifix. The room is crowded with religious images and family photos that not only bespeak a story with a happy ending, but tell the tale of a blessed and faith-filled journey.

In fact, to visit Lisa is to be in the presence of uninterrupted joy. At 91 years young she makes no complaints about aches or pains or life’s struggles. She laughs about the fact that she could not sleep the night before and tells her story with an energy and enthusiasm that seem to belong to younger years.

To understand Lisa’s infectious joie de vivre, it helps to first know the remarkable journey that brought her to Charlestown 44 years ago.

No matter how many times Lisa tells her story, it will always begin with these words: “I had the most wonderful mother!” The many miracles that Lisa believes have shaped her life are all traceable back to the woman named Elsa, whom the Nazis insisted upon calling Sarah. “She was fully Jewish. As a child I did not know this because she wore Catholic religious medals. [She had a personal conversion earlier in life.] My father, Heinz Wiegand, was Lutheran, so I was baptized Lutheran, but I was really raised a Catholic by my mother. She was always 100% Catholic in her heart.” Lisa was the only Protestant in her Catholic kindergarten and she was certainly the only Protestant whose mother taught her to pray the rosary, as well as observe other Catholic devotions.

By the time Lisa was a teenager, she was not only gaining fluency in several languages, she also showed great promise as an opera singer and began to perform on the stage. But Germany in the mid1930s was sinking deeper and deeper into the throes of Hitler and Nazi domination. The Nuremberg Decrees of 1935 had deprived all those of Jewish or half-Jewish lineage of their German citizenship. As a result Lisa was forced off the opera stage to become an understudy instead of a performer. At 17 she went to Denmark to get away from the Nazis and continue her opera career. “In Copenhagen I studied music under a fabulous teacher.” Then Germany conquered Denmark. “I worried so much about my mother, so I returned to Germany.”

Immediately upon her return, Lisa was put to work in a German labor camp. “The Nazis knew everything about every person,” she recalls. Her work in the camp was made easier by her facility with languages. The camp imported Italian shoes, and Lisa’s fluency in Italian, which she still displays seventy years later, earned her a job as an interpreter. She was allowed to return from the camp each night to sleep at home.

Her mother, meanwhile, was required to check in weekly at SS Headquarters and report her whereabouts. One week she was waiting in the room outside the Gestapo’s office praying her rosary. An officer asked her “Why are you praying — do you want to go to the concentration camp?” She said, “No,” and kept praying the rosary. He looked up at her and said, “Go home.” Everyone else in the room was sent off to the concentration camp. “It was the intercession of Our Blessed Mother,” Lisa says. “He could not beat Our Lady.”

Finally, when Lisa’s mother was told to bring a blanket with her the following week, she interpreted this as a signal that she would be sent to Auschwitz, the camp where her sister and niece would both eventually die. The Wiegands made the decision to flee. “We went away and hid in various places for the next couple of years. One time when we were trying to escape by train the Gestapo came on board to check passports. My father and I had passports, but my mother had a ‘J’ card. At the time the Gestapo approached us, my mother by God’s grace was in the toilet and completely avoided being checked.”

Amidst this life of fear and worry, Lisa experienced what she still regards as the seminally transformative event of her life. “We were staying in a very small house and I woke up one morning and pulled up the window shade and this incredible light — I swear you never saw anything like it — came towards me. There! Our Lord Jesus appeared to me. He blessed me! I was so shaken. I went to my mother and she asked me what was happening and I told her, ‘I have to see a priest.’ We went to a priest and he listened to my story and then said, ‘I believe you because this same thing has happened to several people just now.’ Later we realized that my vision had occurred on the Feast of Christ the King. After that, I was never really afraid of anything,” Lisa declares, and listening to her and looking into her face, one understands how true these words are.

The Wiegands continued to try to escape across the German border into France or Switzerland, which is how they came to be outside of the hotel where young Lisa heard gunshots and grasped the revolver in her pocket. As it turns out, the shots she heard were hopeful ones. The allies had arrived and the soldiers in the truck were part of a French-Allied contingent. When their officer, Colonel Charles Monceau, approached Lisa he found a woman who could explain her predicament in fluent French. Asked what would have happened to her and her parents if the truck had been full of German troops, Lisa said they would have been shot.

Colonel Monceau not only rescued Lisa and her family, he also put her to work in his contingent as a translator. Lisa later received a letter of commendation for her bravery and service. “Colonel Monceau was like a second father to me and he wanted me to come to Paris to marry his son, but I wanted to return to Frankfurt with my parents.”

In Frankfurt Lisa went to work as an interpreter for the American Consulate and recalls taking off one Sunday afternoon with a friend to visit the Frankfurt Zoo. There she and her friend spotted “two American soldiers and one of them had dark hair and was just gorgeous!” Later she would run across these soldiers again near where she lived. She would pretend not to speak much English until she learned that the one to whom she had been attracted, David, was engaged to a woman in New York. “I told him ‘under those circumstances, then, we can be friends.’ He was Jewish. I told him I was going to become a Catholic, and that I was planning to have a career as a professional singer. We became good friends. But we began to like each other too much. He was a fabulous dancer!”

When David learned from friends back in the states that his fiancé had been unfaithful to him, he broke off the engagement and asked Lisa to marry him. Lisa had fallen in love long before she was willing to admit it, and soon she and her parents were on a boat to New York where she and David were married at City Hall. “I was still a Protestant and he was still Jewish. We married and then what miracles began to happen!”

After they married, David and Lisa lived in the Bronx and then in Yonkers, where Lisa’s father, who changed his name to Henry, established a very successful woodwork machinery business that he had brought over from Germany. He sold German and Italian-made machines all over the United States, including Claremont, New Hampshire, where he would eventually re-locate the company headquarters. This prompted David and Lisa’s move to Charlestown in the late sixties. Lisa worked in the family business and often traveled to Europe, putting her translation skills to work. When her father died, David took over the family business.

When she first came to New York in 1945, Lisa had continued singing, getting parts in operettas and as a choral member. She sang in concerts, churches and synagogues. When they moved to Yonkers she began to work for her father and sang less, and then, “After my father died — he died way too young — I didn’t feel like singing anymore.”

Lisa fulfilled her desire to become a Catholic when she was baptized along with her two children in the early 1950s. She and David made pilgrimages together, and after experiencing the presence of Saint Padre Pio in the mysterious fragrance of roses at San Giovanni Rotondo, Lisa developed a special devotion. To this day Lisa describes herself as a Franciscan. David was baptized at Saint Catherine Parish (now All Saints Parish) in Charlestown in the 1970s. “David became a great Catholic,” Lisa boasts, “I used to pray only one rosary a day. When David became a Catholic he said we would pray four. I still do. The rosary is my life.”

David died nine years ago and is buried at Saint Catherine’s Cemetery in Charlestown. The rosary is still a big part of Lisa’s daily prayer life and she gets to Mass as often as possible and to run errands, she has come to rely on faithful members of All Saints Parish, friends whom she refers to as her “angels.”

“I am so very grateful to God for all that I have had in life, grateful that my mother taught me as a young child about Jesus. God was always our life and God wanted me to marry my husband.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, one cannot help noticing the impressive grandfather clock that keeps the time. “It was my father’s. He was able to take it with him from Germany.” In its beautiful wooden casing, the clock stands as sturdy as Lisa herself, still marking the minutes with German precision, chiming out the hours that have turned to years and then faded to decades. It has witnessed a life that few of us can imagine having lived: daring escapes from death, mystical visions, passionate love, heartfelt loss, enduring faith, and joy beyond telling. The stuff of movies and the stuff of life. A real life lived in the constant grace of God, and happily recounted just up a narrow, wooded road in the town of Charlestown, New Hampshire.

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