I loved trains as a child

I loved trains as a child.

But when I was 10 years old,

I had to take the longest train journey of my life.

I remember how I was picked up from school

and seeing my grandparents standing there with pillowcases

into which they had stuffed all their belongings.

I see us getting on a military truck in Kippenheim

and hear an officer on the platform say to my father:

“You can take off your Iron Cross; it’s of no use to you now.”

We drove across the Rhine. Harvesting was going on everywhere.

The farmers worked alongside the railroad tracks with scythes and handcarts.

It was also the time of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles.

In Germany, the harvest was also underway.

But the harvest was people.

Two nights later and many destroyed houses further on, we arrived at a place

in the Pyrenees – where the beds were straw mattresses and the coffee was

from roasted grain and where the food consisted of pieces of horse meat with rotten cabbage.

Gurs was a place of noise:

– of constant rain pelting down on the roofs

– of rats climbing over people at night.

It was a place of smells:

– of latrines and mud from the rain.

It was a place where everything was gray:

– the walls

– the sky.

Even the marsh was gray. Like the faces of the people.

You constantly felt fear in your stomach.

But at least it filled the emptiness of hunger.

You also felt the cold.

You slept in your coat.

The night wind made it stiff as a sheet of stone.

I contracted diphtheria in the camp.

They took me to the infirmary.

In the bed to my right lay a film actress.

Perhaps she dreamed of going to the West.

But I fear they took her to the East.

In the bed to my left lay Liesel Kling—a little girl.

She gave me a photo of herself when we were feeling better,

and I gave her a kiss. I don’t know what became of her, but

I still have her photo. And a picture in my mind.

An actress—the son of a businessman—a little girl

from nowhere…

You can see: the harvest has been gathered.

They gathered us all.

It didn’t matter who you were.

We all had one thing in common: we were what they were looking for.

Now it’s harvest time again – now we have come to collect them

– in our memory.

In Judaism, the dead are wrapped in a shroud and buried quickly.

We do not lay them out and look at them.

We want to remember the dead as living beings.

So we commemorate them today in this beautiful German landscape.

How they loved Germany!

How much they wished to be back home in their beds!

Today we collect them together with all the dead and those who fell victim to pogroms and torture.

We cannot bring them back.

But we can give meaning to what happened if we agree

that something like this must never happen again!