obituaries
JARRAD SAFFREN | STAFF WRITER
B y all accounts, Yvonne Sytner
Lutzner was a “beautiful,
charming and magnetic”
woman. As her daughter Jodie Garay
explained, “There was something about
her. People loved her.”
Garay doesn’t doubt that this qual-
ity helped her mother survive the
Holocaust. Born in 1934 in Antwerp, Belgium,
she hid in plain sight under an
assumed name through the Shoah and
World War II. Sytner Lutzner, who
was Jewish, stayed with two differ-
ent non-Jewish families, even going to
church every morning during her time
with one of them.

After the war, while staying in an
orphanage for Jewish children, Sytner
30 Lutzner was spotted by a cousin in
the Army, who put her on a refugee
ship to America. Once there, “she was
welcomed by her uncle, Louis Sitner, in
Philadelphia” and raised by his daugh-
ter and son-in-law, Miriam Sitner
Clibanoff and Louis Clibanoff, accord-
ing to her family. And in 1954 she
married “the boy next door,” Herman
Lutzner, and raised a family with him
in Havertown for the next 64 years.

“She was a positive and upbeat per-
son,” Garay said. “She was so grateful
to have family and to have created
family.” Sytner Lutzner died on Oct. 12. She
was 87.

The Holocaust survivor is survived
by her children Jodie Garay (Andrea
Stanley) and Jeffrey Lutzner (Jessica
DeGroot) and three grandchildren.

She is also survived by her little sis-
OCTOBER 27, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
ter/biological cousin Lynne Selkow, the
daughter of the Clibanoffs who grew
up with Sytner Lutzner. The “sisters”
talked every day for the rest of their
lives. “It’s just what we did,” Selkow said.

In August 1942, Sytner Lutzner’s
brother had already been transported
to Auschwitz, according to Garay. So
her parents, Abram and Rosa Sytner,
tried to save their daughter by paying
a non-Jewish family to take care of her.

The Sytners knew the parents, who
lived north of Antwerp, because their
son had gone to school with Sytner-
Lutzner’s brother.

For more than a year, the young girl
pretended to be Catholic and went to
church every morning. The nuns and
priest knew she was Jewish, kept it a
secret and did not even make her take
confession. Over time, Sytner Lutzner
“kind of fell in love with the church,”
her daughter said.

“I think she felt safe there,” Garay
added. Soon after, though, Sytner Lutzner
no longer felt safe. One of the family
members, Garay believes, was having
an affair with a German soldier. But
the underground network in Belgium
helped transport Sytner Lutzner to a
different family in Brussels, the Le
Chats, with whom she stayed until the
end of the war.

The young girl’s new guardians were
“a bit older,” Garay said, with a daugh-
ter in her early 20s. And they treated
Sytner Lutzner like a second daughter,
giving her all the food, protection and
comfort she needed.

“They loved her,” Garay said. “She
loved them.”
Sytner Lutzner would have stayed
with the Le Chats, but Zionist organi-
zations were gathering Jewish children
into orphanages for survivor parents to
identify. Sytner Lutzner never saw her
parents again, but she did run into that
distant cousin in the Army, who filled
out the paperwork that allowed her to
emigrate. Garay, whose mother told her every-
thing about her Holocaust experience,
is still not sure how, exactly, the cousin
knew Sytner Lutzner was a member of
his extended family.

“He found her,” the daughter said.

If he hadn’t, the young girl never
would have met Herman Lutzner, who
literally lived next door. Once they
started dating when he was 26 and she
20, they became “inseparable,” accord-
ing to Garay.

After they started a family, Herman
Lutzner worked and she stayed home.

As their daughter explained, her focus
was her family.

She cooked great meals like spaghetti
and chicken. She attended every sport-
ing event that her children played in.

Her unconditional love enabled them
to “walk with confidence,” said Jeffrey
Lutzner, who later went on to own a
manufacturing company.

And once her children had chil-
dren, Sytner Lutzner loved her grand-
kids even more unconditionally. Jeff
Lutzner, his wife Jessica DeGroot and
their kids Jocelyn and Julian lived
in the Philadelphia area, so the kids
would go over to their grandparents’
house in Havertown every Friday night
growing up.

Yvonne Sytner Lutzner would cook
dinner, and the four of them would
play Scrabble, watch TV shows like
“Reno 911!” and go for walks in a
nearby park. The grandma even took
care of the family dog, Meeko.

“She was a big proponent of spending
quality time together,” Julian DeGroot-
Lutzner said. JE
jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of the Lutzner family
Holocaust Survivor Yvonne Sytner
Lutzner Dies at 87