Brothers Beyond Blood Read Free Page A

guards, who still of fighting age, were rounded up and sent to the fronts, this left just a couple of old men, pensioners from the last war, as if there were any more pensions to collect; and finally, towards the end, some of the Hitler Youth lads. Most of these were too young to fight in regular army units, but they were the only ones left to guard the camps.
    I hope you’re sitting down when you read this. Your Uncle Hans was a member of the Hitler Youth (Hitler-Jugend or HJ) and a camp guard.
    I know what you’re thinking. How could that be? He was such a good Jew. He was my brother and your uncle. Yes, yes, that was what you were supposed to think. Wait, Hans wants to say something here.
     
    ***
    Oy, your father simply runs on and on, doesn’t he? Now for my story, if anyone is interested. You know all the old tales about how your father and I fought in the Warsaw Ghetto together, how we were in a camp and came to America after the war? O.K., so it’s partly true, only not the part about the Warsaw Ghetto. We were in a camp and did come to America together.
    Didn’t you children once ask why we had no tattoos on our forearms? Do you remember what I said? That I was a latecomer and that there was no one to run the tattoo needle on the day I came to the camp? Well, your Pop and I weren’t at Auschwitz, and that was the only camp that tattooed prisoners. But the real reason is because I wasn’t a prisoner. I was a guard.
    I was born and brought up in a town near the Black Forest close by the Austrian border. I had a normal childhood. I went to school, joined the Boy Scouts, had a sister named Ilsa and a father who was a middle manager at a nearby Daimler Benz factory. My mother was sickly and died when I was eight. Ilsa and I were close, and it was she who introduced me to the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior version of the Hitler Youth. I loved it. We went camping and I learned to shoot a gun and ride a horse. We sang songs and took part in rallies. By the time I was fourteen, I was head of my cell. I tried to enlist in the Waffen SS, but I was too young and my father, who was a good member of the party, wouldn’t lie for me. Instead, I helped the local police. We watched for saboteurs and made sure that people used their blackout curtains. To my everlasting shame, I also helped round up Jews and vandalized their shops and homes. In other words, I was a good little Nazi boy.
    We all knew the war was ending and not in a good way for the German people again. So I was surprised when I got a call from our district commander. He was an older man named Strichcher, who had lost an arm and one eye in the last war. He told me to pack a bag and take a train to Kefferstadt, a camp near Dachau. I was excited. I was going to war! I bade my father and sister goodbye, and went off the next day. Shortly after that, our town was bombed, and my father and sister were killed. I didn’t find this out until much later.
    And so I came to the camp known as Kefferstadt. It was a small, remote camp out in the country, almost five miles from the nearby town of Keffer. Along the front of the camp was a tall row of barbed wire stretching between two high guard towers, with a gate in the center. The barbed wire was nailed to posts set about two meters apart. In the rear was only one guard tower but it had a powerful searchlight and was always manned. Inside the gate was a long building. This contained Commandant Boettcher’s office and quarters, the guard’s barracks, and the mess hall. These buildings were made of wood, whitewashed with green trim, very neat, very German. In the compound were two stone buildings that looked like cottages and a row of six wooden buildings. These were the barracks for the prisoners. They were also made of wood, though not painted or trimmed. The roofs were corrugated tin and leaked when it rained, I learned later. Inside were rows of wooden shelving racks, three high, with no bedding. The men slept on the bare