Have You Counted the Stars: Memoir of a Holocaust Orphan’s Survival and Success

When Simon Steil was four years old, his mother, father, and brother were taken from their home in Antwerp, Belgium by the Nazis, and he never saw them again. Simon spent the next seven years moving between several orphanages and the home of a Belgian family who took him in for a time, until he was sent for in 1950 by relatives in the United States. At the Belgian passport office where he applied for his separation papers, he learned his date of birth and the proper spelling of his last name for the first time. He had just turned twelve.
One of Simon's few memories from his early childhood was being at a deportation center where there was an old piano, and a group of people who would gather around it and sing as they waited for the Nazis to decide their fate. He could only recall these lines from their song:
A tu conte les etoiles dans le ciel radieux?
"Have you counted the stars in the radiant sky?"

With his emigration to America, Simon began a lifelong journey to find out the story of his childhood and his family. Where had he lived once they had vanished from his life? Who were they? What was their family history? And what, finally, had happened to them? In this volume is the picture of their lives that he pieced together over the course of decades, with a combination of research, hope, and sheer persistence, so that his children--and their children--could carry his story with them into the future.