Dr. Bruno Lambert dies at 103; internist fled Nazi Germany, returned as a liberating G.I.
Dr. Bruno Lambert, 103, who escaped Nazi Germany, returned as a liberating American soldier and then worked as an internist in New York, died Nov. 14 from natural causes in his Jamaica Estates home. He was 103. Credit: Handout
Dr. Bruno Lambert, who escaped Nazi Germany, returned as a liberating American soldier and then worked as an internist in New York City for more than half a century, died Nov. 14 from natural causes in his Jamaica Estates home. He was 103.
A son, Glenn Lambert of Los Angeles, reported the death.
"Aryanization" laws excluding Jews from public life were tightening in Germany in 1938 when a German Jewish émigré in New York named Margaret Bergman raised the money to cover his exit fees. Lambert and Bergman married soon after his arrival in New York City.
Lambert had left his parents, Simon and Lina, in the Rhineland town of Andernach. A brother, Alfred, and a sister, Hannah, also escaped. In the months before Kristallnacht began the escalation of persecution and violence against Jews in Germany, Lambert's parents still believed life there was possible.
Lambert exchanged a few heavily censored letters with them after leaving, but communication was cut. He suspected they had been swept up in the Holocaust, but their fate was a mystery to him for most of his life.
He'd earned a medical degree in Switzerland and eventually worked as an intern at what is now Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn.
In February 1942, on the day he received his citizenship papers, Lambert enlisted in the U.S. Army as a medical officer. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he rose to major in the 103rd Infantry Division.
During one stretch of fighting, family said, Lambert performed combat medicine for 72 hours straight. The feat earned him a Bronze Star.
By 1995, Lambert was retired from a successful practice in Ridgewood, Queens, where he had made house calls into his 80s. He and Bergman had settled in Jamaica Estates in 1955 and raised two sons, Glenn and Gary. He had a passion for the Mets and for American movies, which he sometimes quoted with a trace of the German accent that never left him.
When Bergman -- an elite high jumper who competed under the name Gretel Bergmann and who had been named to and then purged from the 1936 German Olympic team -- was asked to contribute material for an exhibit on the Games at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lambert went, too.
"Bruno and I, reluctantly, decided to go through the Museum," Bergman wrote in her autobiography, "By Leaps and Bounds." They looked up his family name in the archives. "A list of victims, kept meticulously by Nazi efficiency, revealed the names of Bruno's parents and about 30 relatives . . . Bruno, who up to now had lived in total denial of what had happened to his parents, finally had to face reality. It was a shattering experience."
In addition to his widow and son Glenn, Lambert is survived by his son Gary, of Jamaica Estates; and two grandchildren.
Services will be Sunday at noon at Schwartz Brothers Jeffer funeral home, 114-03 Queens Blvd., Forest Hills, with burial to follow at Mt. Hebron Cemetery.
Contributions in his memory may be made to Doctors Without Borders at https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/?.
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