Brothers Beyond Blood Read Free

Yes, Miriam, you are named after her. I was the youngest child of three and we lived in a nice town in Eastern Germany called Teplice. My father and his father had been jewelers. The Nazis killed my family during the war. I saw my father and grandfather shot out front of our shop. My mother and sister were raped, and sent to the women’s’ extermination camp in Ravensbruck where I later learned they were gassed and burned. I’m telling you this in brutal terms so you will get a feeling for what we all went through.
    I was separated from my brother and sent to the concentration camp at Kefferstadt. This was a sub-camp of Dachau. Being older, he went to a different camp. I never did find out what happened to him.
    Did you know that the British General Herbert Kitchener, before he was awarded his Lordship, invented concentration camps during the Second Boer war? He rounded up guerilla fighters and civilians and concentrated them into large camps. Interesting, no?
    Anyway, I met your Uncle Hans in the camp where I was a prisoner. At the time I was fifteen years old and he was sixteen. I’d been at the camp for almost three years before he showed up. This happened near the end of the war, as it turned out, only five months until the American army liberated us.
    At the time, I was a Sonderkommando or Special Command Unit. These units were comprised of Jews whose job was to remove the corpses from the gas houses, transport them to the trenches and bury them. We also collected their possessions, pulled gold teeth and a sorted and catalogued the belongings. Yes, my job was as a Sonderkommando.
    In the early days, when the camps were being set up, the people were told that they were going to shower. They were instructed to pile their clothes and possessions in bins we had made. The Nazi guards even went so far as to allow the men and women to be sent in separately. Later they stopped being so nice and we Sonderkommando had to strip both the men and the women of all their clothing. I had never even seen a woman naked. For years afterward I had terrible flashback images of all those naked women’s bodies. I even had bad dreams when I saw your mother naked, as beautiful as she was.
    Several of us younger and stronger fellows, loaded the corpses onto low-wheeled trolleys and took them to the trenches. After we dumped our fellow Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and ‘enemies of the state’ into the trenches, we ran back to the gas building and gathered up the piles of goods and took them to a central warehouse where we distributed them into the appropriate bins. We stole and hid what we could, which wasn’t much because we were guarded closely, especially in the early days. In the evenings, before we were sent back to our barracks, the guards stripped us and inspected our clothes, often beating us with clubs and short whips for no reason. It got to be routine and I hated the guards who did this. Hated them with a passion that burns in me to this day. I still bear the scars on my back and in my joints from the brutality. Not all guards were so brutal though, and towards the end of the war, youngsters replaced the older guards nearly my own age. This lessened the number of beatings as the younger guards saw us as nearly like them. I sometimes slipped a gold tooth to one particular guard. He rarely hit me. I don’t know if he shared with the other guards or with the commandant, a Major Boettcher. I suspect he didn’t, but who can say? Those were terrible times and nothing really made any sense. We worked hard. The trains kept coming, bringing more and more people until I wondered if there was anyone left in Europe. Perhaps the young guards were frightened as the war’s end approached.
    But the trains grew fewer, perhaps due to increased Allied bombings, lack of fuel or a scarcity of enemies of the state. Soon they stopped altogether. Many of the other inmates died from diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, scurvy, or just wore out. As the