On the 7. May 1943, Zvi Cohen still remembers exactly. At the time, he was called Horst Cohn, was just eleven years old and had lived up to this day in Berlin. As a Jew, he had experienced since the “seizure of power” Adolf Hitler’s already a lot of Bad things. However, from this 7. May everything should be much worse, because together with his parents, he was taken to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in.
even before the beginning of the war, it was dangerous for him to go on the road. On the way to school Horst was beaten up regularly by “Aryan” classmates. They called like sayings such as “Until the Jewish blood spurts”. Then the visit to the school, like so many other things, was forbidden, and all Jews had to wear, but starting in September of 1941 with a yellow star on the jacket. And the situation was getting worse and more dangerous.
Horst had spent the past two years, day in and day out in the apartment. His parents were forced to work and were gone from early morning until late in the evening. To go on the road was in Berlin in the year 1943 for a Jewish boy was much too dangerous, because there is always the danger that German “Aryans” beat him up, or the men of the Secret state police (Gestapo), or SS took him and without his parents deported. So the Boy stayed all day alone in the apartment, and busied himself with his harmonica.
Horst played “I was deported to a comrade”
Since last year, the Berlin Jews were systematically to the extermination camps in the East such as Auschwitz and also the Cohn’s were waiting anxiously for the day their own Deportation. Now, at this 7. In may 1943, he had come. However, since the parents were in their Farms, delivery Horst danger, and not to be moved.
The Chance that he would have ever seen again, would have been Zero. But he had an idea: He pulled out his harmonica, on which he had practiced during his lonely days so much, and played the old sentimental soldier’s song “I had a comrade”.
The Gestapo of men who were themselves dog in the apartment, were so impressed that they ordered him to continue the game. So Horst “Lilli Marleen” was the Best and a lot of other German songs he could play.
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The Gestapo men could not get enough and they allowed Horst, from the shop below on the ground floor of the house, his parents call and inform you that you should come home.
Only when you are in the apartment arrived, they had to go to a Jewish school, where they had to wait twelve days for their transport. Horst Cohn was convinced from that day on, the harmonica has saved his life, alone without his parents, he would have had no Chance to survive, the time, the consequences should be. Decades later he has written down his memories of that time and his life to the Survival in a book. “The Boy with the harmonica From the Theresienstadt Ghetto, the train to freedom” here at Amazon
Theresienstadt concentration camp: the flagship camps of the Nazis
The Cohen’s order had, after all, a blessing in disguise. They were not sent to Auschwitz or other extermination camps, but to Theresienstadt in what was then German-annexed “protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”. In the old garrison town about 50 kilometers North of Prague, the Nazi authorities had set up a camp, this should serve as a kind of model camp.
It is that you will not be so bad to the Jews, as alleged will should documents. The camp was established in the old barracks and a mix of concentration camp and the Jews was the Ghetto. The conditions were actually something better than a “real” camp, but they were still brutal and murderous. Horst was able to visit here regularly blocks his parents, who had also been separated, in their prison.
33,000 people died in Theresienstadt
Actually, the conditions were so bad that the prisoners by the Thousands died. Nearly 140,000 men, women and children were brought to Theresienstadt, around 88,000 later from here, but then continue to Auschwitz for extermination. Of these deportees 3000 survived. Around 33,000 people died in Theresienstadt, around 19,000 could be saved.
on the first day Horst Dead in the thrust needed to transport animals and carts in the same cart, the scanty bread, the prisoners were given to eat was, then, transported. The food was such that older and weaker people could barely survive.
So it was Horst’s beloved grandparents. One day, he learned that they, too, had also been from Berlin, were deported to Theresienstadt. He could locate her, but when he saw you, was the horror large. Almost starved to death, were grandma and grandpa, hardly more alive, and actually she died a short time later.
Horst poured the ashes of his grandparents in the river
Horst was inconsolable. The feeling was again increased, as he was obliged, in the Winter of 1944/45, to hide the traces of the dead. The Red army moved inexorably closer, and the camp administration wanted to avoid, that the Russians would come across references to the countless murders, if they would liberate Theresienstadt.
Horst and other young people had to carry thousands of cardboard boxes to the nearby river Eger and the contents in the river tilt. The content was the ashes of people murdered in the camp, or to the consequences of malnutrition and disease had died.
The corpses were incinerated in crematorium and the ashes have been meticulously kept in the cardboard boxes. With German thoroughness cartons, the Name of the Person whose ash was in it was on each of the alphabetical sort. And so Horst also found the boxes with the ashes of his grandparents. He wore them to the river and scattered them.
More on history
In the Winter of 1945 sets, it was clear that the Red army was unstoppable. Chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler, the Supreme Lord of the concentration camps, planned to save his skin, he was imprisoned Jews for money free. He negotiated, among other things, with the former Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy, and this is achieved by Himmler against the payment of large sums of money and the provision of truck for the release of Jews from Theresienstadt. On 5. February 1945, a train with 1200 passport sat act in the direction of Switzerland – on Board Horst and his parents were. They had the unspeakable happiness.
Only one train in the freedom
came to Cohn’s on this way to freedom. It remained, however, the only train in freedom, because Adolf Hitler also stopped all the action. Himmler had organised behind his back, Hitler had learned from the foreign press. Theresienstadt was only at 8. In may, the day of the surrender of the German Wehrmacht, released.
Horst and his parents have been nursed in a Hotel in Switzerland and were finally able to leave the country a few months later, with the permission of the British mandate power in Palestine. There, Horst, Cohn changed his name in the Hebrew Zvi Cohen. He lived in a kibbutz, fought as a soldier in the Israeli army. In 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, he returned for the first time in his hometown of Berlin, later he came even more often.
He had, so Zvi Cohen writes in his book, the impression that the third and fourth post-war generation in Germany of interest open today for what is the Generation of the grandparents or great Grand parents. Therefore, he did not trust initially his eyes, as if he had read some time ago that in Germany it will be discussed whether, because of the growing Muslim minority, the teaching of history even so more could be as in the past. But this is a development that Zvi Cohen warns strictly.
“Know Less about anti-Semitism is dangerous,”
His opinion is clear: “to give Less Knowledge about the national socialism and anti-Semitism, but it would be completely wrong, because all of the life in today’s Germany, you should know something about this. Regardless of whether your ancestors were responsible or not at all involved“. One power Cohen, but also clear – that the present Generation of Germans to wear and is of course not to blame for the Nazi past.
See you in the PCP you can See in the
