Henry Lowenstein (Ernst Heinrich Loewenstein)

Henry Lowenstein was born in Berlin, Germany on July 4, 1925. His parents, Max and Maria Loewenstein, named their first son Ernst Heinrich Loewenstein, but he was called Heinrich, and later changed his name to Henry Lowenstein. Maria was born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1894 and studied art in St. Petersburg, Russia. Maria left St. Petersburg with her first husband during the Russian Revolution of 1917. After her husband’s death, she and her daughter, Karin Steinberg, moved to Berlin, where she met and married Max Loewenstein. Born in Lessen [Lasin], West Prussia [today Poland] in 1885, Max moved to Germany to study medicine. After World War I, he settled in Berlin and opened a medical practice.

Max and Maria were active in the thriving art scene of prewar Berlin and frequently attended the theater. Henry grew up in a large apartment near the center of Berlin, celebrating both Jewish and Christian holidays and surrounded by his parents’ artist friends. He was seven years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. In school, he was subjected to mistreatment from German classmates and teachers who supported the Nazis. Henry and his friends had to change their route to school daily to avoid Nazi gangs. After Jewish children were barred from attending German schools, Henry enrolled in a Jewish school and a Jewish boy scout group. These Jewish institutions provided a community of support that helped Henry survive increasing persecution under the Nazis.

Henry was 13 years old in November 1938, when the wave of anti-Jewish violence known as Kristallnacht (literally, "crystal night" or the "night of broken glass") erupted. Henry’s uncle Georg Loewenstein, who lived nearby, was rounded up in a Nazi raid and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. The rest of the family gathered at Georg’s apartment to hide and stayed there for several weeks.

The Loewenstein family had always counted many non-Jewish Germans among their friends, but they were faced with the painful truth that they could not count on those friends for help. For most Germans, the fear of reprisals was an effective deterrent against helping Jews. Because Henry’s half-sister and mother were not Jewish, they were able to come and go from their hiding place to maintain a semblance of normalcy while the situation for Jews in Germany worsened. The Nazis required Jews to register with the Gestapo, forced all Jewish men to adopt the middle name "Israel" and Jewish women to adopt the middle name "Sara." Henry and his father were issued identity cards identifying them as Jewish on March 31, 1939 at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.

Finding a way to leave Germany became the highest priority, but many countries had immigration restrictions that made it difficult for adults to obtain visas. Many Jewish families looked to send their children abroad through international initiatives. Henry and his parents sought such an opportunity, and Henry was accepted for a Kindertransport, a program funded by private citizens and Jewish organizations that allowed refugee children to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories on temporary visas. Some 10,000 children were brought to Great Britain via Kindertransport between 1938 and 1940. Many of them never saw their families again.

Henry left Berlin on June 5, 1939. Upon arrival in England, he went first to London then transferred to a refugee camp for children in Westgate. After six weeks, he was sent back to London, where he attended school for two weeks before the British government ordered all children to be evacuated from London due to the threat of German bombardment. The school was relocated to the village of Whipsnade in the countryside north of London. Henry was sent to live on a farm next to the Whipsnade zoo. He attended school, learned English, and eventually started to work, first at the zoo, and later on the farm.

Throughout the war, the rest of the Loewenstein family, including Henry’s non-Jewish half-sister, Karin, remained in Berlin. The family suffered because they lived in a Jewish household, yet Maria was able to save Max from being transported to concentration camps on several occasions. Henry and his family in Berlin communicated through Red Cross messages, which were limited to 25 words and subject to censor. These messages served only to confirm that the family was alive and well.

After the war, Karin, who worked as an assistant to Otto Grotewohl, leader of the Socialist Democrats in Germany, provided information about Soviet activities to an American contact. In order to protect the Loewenstein family, the U.S. government facilitated the family's immigration to the United States in 1946. Henry joined his family in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 1947. It was here that they changed their name from Loewenstein to Lowenstein.

In Pennsylvania, 23-year-old Henry re-commenced his high school education in the evenings while digging graves for work during the day. It took him only seven months to graduate from high school, after which he worked in an iron foundry and then a paper factory while continuing his education in art. Henry’s father died in 1947, never fully recovering from the experience of the war. Henry’s mother found her way back to art with a faculty position at Bucknell University.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Henry joined the Air Force. During his three years of service, he worked as an artist and illustrator at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois. Thanks to the commanding general there, he was able to take college classes at the University of Illinois. It was here that Henry began to work in theater, designing stage sets and employing his childhood exposure to the thriving theater scene in prewar Berlin. After his discharge in 1953, Henry attended Yale University Drama School, earning the equivalent of an MFA despite not having completed an undergraduate degree.

While he was working at a theater in New Haven, he was recruited by Helen Bonfils to design shows for the Bonfils Theatre in Denver, Colorado. Henry, his wife, Doris, and their first son relocated to Denver in 1956. Karin and Maria moved to Denver in the mid-1960s after the death of Karin’s husband. Henry and Doris raised three sons in Denver: David, Daniel, and Joshua. Doris passed away in 1990 after a battle with cancer, and Henry remarried Deborah Goodman in 1994.

Through a nearly 40-year career in Colorado, Henry came to be known as “the father of Denver theater.” In 1985, the Bonfils was renamed the Lowenstein Theater in his honor. Henry Lowenstein passed away in 2014 at the age of 89, and today the Colorado Theatre Guild presents annual Henry Awards for outstanding achievement.