I loved trains as a child.<\/p>\n
But when I was 10 years old,<\/p>\n
I had to take the longest train journey of my life.<\/p>\n
I remember how I was picked up from school<\/p>\n
and seeing my grandparents standing there with pillowcases<\/p>\n
into which they had stuffed all their belongings.<\/p>\n
I see us getting on a military truck in Kippenheim<\/p>\n
and hear an officer on the platform say to my father:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can take off your Iron Cross; it’s of no use to you now.\u201d<\/p>\n
We drove across the Rhine. Harvesting was going on everywhere.<\/p>\n
The farmers worked alongside the railroad tracks with scythes and handcarts.<\/p>\n
It was also the time of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles.<\/p>\n
In Germany, the harvest was also underway.<\/p>\n
But the harvest was people.<\/p>\n
Two nights later and many destroyed houses further on, we arrived at a place<\/p>\n
in the Pyrenees \u2013 where the beds were straw mattresses and the coffee was<\/p>\n
from roasted grain and where the food consisted of pieces of horse meat with rotten cabbage.<\/p>\n
Gurs was a place of noise:<\/p>\n
\u2013 of constant rain pelting down on the roofs<\/p>\n
\u2013 of rats climbing over people at night.<\/p>\n
It was a place of smells:<\/p>\n
\u2013 of latrines and mud from the rain.<\/p>\n
It was a place where everything was gray:<\/p>\n
\u2013 the walls<\/p>\n
\u2013 the sky.<\/p>\n
Even the marsh was gray. Like the faces of the people.<\/p>\n
You constantly felt fear in your stomach.<\/p>\n
But at least it filled the emptiness of hunger.<\/p>\n
You also felt the cold.<\/p>\n
You slept in your coat.<\/p>\n
The night wind made it stiff as a sheet of stone.<\/p>\n
I contracted diphtheria in the camp.<\/p>\n
They took me to the infirmary.<\/p>\n
In the bed to my right lay a film actress.<\/p>\n
Perhaps she dreamed of going to the West.<\/p>\n
But I fear they took her to the East.<\/p>\n
In the bed to my left lay Liesel Kling\u2014a little girl.<\/p>\n
She gave me a photo of herself when we were feeling better,<\/p>\n
and I gave her a kiss. I don’t know what became of her, but<\/p>\n
I still have her photo. And a picture in my mind.<\/p>\n
An actress\u2014the son of a businessman\u2014a little girl<\/p>\n
from nowhere…<\/p>\n
You can see: the harvest has been gathered.<\/p>\n
They gathered us all.<\/p>\n
It didn’t matter who you were.<\/p>\n
We all had one thing in common: we were what they were looking for.<\/p>\n
Now it’s harvest time again \u2013 now we have come to collect them<\/p>\n
\u2013 in our memory.<\/p>\n
In Judaism, the dead are wrapped in a shroud and buried quickly.<\/p>\n
We do not lay them out and look at them.<\/p>\n
We want to remember the dead as living beings.<\/p>\n
So we commemorate them today in this beautiful German landscape.<\/p>\n
How they loved Germany!<\/p>\n
How much they wished to be back home in their beds!<\/p>\n
Today we collect them together with all the dead and those who fell victim to pogroms and torture.<\/p>\n
We cannot bring them back.<\/p>\n
But we can give meaning to what happened if we agree<\/p>\n
that something like this must never happen again!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I loved trains as a child I loved trains as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":604,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-613","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1477,"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/613\/revisions\/1477"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragnach.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}