By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – At age 7, Charles Rotmil was on the run, a fugitive whose only crime was being Jewish in Nazi-occupied lands.

At 11, he was an orphan and a hidden child with a new name, a new family and a new religion.

At 13, he was a survivor.

For more than a decade, Rotmil, a Portland resident, has told his story of torment and escape to schoolchildren, teachers and other groups. On Tuesday, he brought it to students at Lewiston Middle School.

“I’m the one who went through the net. I didn’t get caught,” he told the teenagers.

More than 100 eighth-graders attended Rotmil’s 80-minute presentation Monday morning. The students read Holocaust-based literature in their English classes and planned research projects for later in the semester.

“It’s nice hearing it from someone who went through it, from their perspective,” said 13-year-old Allyson LePage.

Using family photos, newspaper articles and other props, Rotmil, 73, talked about his life in flight.

Born in 1932 in Poland, Rotmil was the youngest of three children, the son of a Jewish art broker and homemaker. The family moved to France, then, unluckily, to Vienna.

“We went right in the mouth of the wolf,” said Rotmil, his French accent tinged with German.

In 1938, they were caught in Kristallnacht, a riot in which Jewish people were killed, synagogues burned and Jewish-owned stores broken into. The family moved to Belgium soon after, but Nazi Germany quickly invaded that region, too.

They fled on foot, and in the turmoil were separated from Rotmil’s father. Days later, the remaining family boarded a train bound for France. Rotmil’s mother and sister were killed when the train crashed.

Rotmil and his brother were briefly reunited with their father, but he was soon arrested and killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

A Catholic monk took Rotmil and his older brother, giving them new names and new families. Rotmil’s brother went to live on a farm. Rotmil stayed with four families before landing with the Luyckx family and their five children.

Overnight, he became Charles Von Roemsdonck, a Catholic schoolboy.

He spent months there, playing altar boy, learning about saints, hiding from Nazi soldiers. In 1944, when Belgium was liberated, Rotmil was reunited with his brother. They found a home with an aunt and uncle in New York.

Rotmil was 13.

“By that time I was a veteran of the war, so to speak,” he said.

And like other war veterans, scars remained for decades.

“To this day I have a very hard time with shouting politicians. Even the good ones,” he said. “I’m scared in shouting crowds. Like that football game the other day. You hope it (the shouting) is for a good cause, but what if it isn’t?”

Now the father of four, Rotmil has spent his adult life teaching, writing and doing photography. He’s also immersed himself into research on the Holocaust.

“It’s become a lifetime occupation for me to delve, to research this. I dwell on it,” he said.

After his large group presentation, Rotmil planned to spend both Tuesday and Wednesday talking with Lewiston Middle School students in smaller groups and one-on-one.

Several teenagers said they looked forward to it.

“He was interesting,” said Derrick Doucette, 14. “He made it through that, and he’s still alive.”

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