(Sept.1942) a loud pounding
at the door brought his protector/farmer to attention. When the farmer
opened the door Horst saw the Nazi soldier and knew it was too late
to hide. Horst was loaded up on an army truck with a tarp
covering the back and sat through the roundup of many of his fellow
teenagers in the agricultural program. Toward the end of the roundup,
the soldiers were coming up empty-handed as farmers began to warn others
of the roundup. They drove throughout the night, and the next day were
put on a boat in Copenhagen and eventually
taken to Theresienstadt in what
is now the Czech Republic.
For three years Horst lived in Theresienstadt. It was an unusual
place for a concentration camp. The Nazis had set it up as a "model
camp." At the beginning of Hitler’s
power, it was thought that one solution for the "Jewish
problem" might be to annex all the population
to a special area such as Theresienstadt. They
even coined ''Jewish money'' so that there would be a separate economy.
By 1942, the Final Solution was in place with
Theresienendt was a way station for many
Jews on the way to death camps deeper inPoland. It was also used as a
"front" for such
observer organizations as the Red Cross who would be taken there
to see how well Germany was caring for its prisoners. It was a facade.
Horst recalls a little village with small
houses, nicely furnished for show.
Whenever a delegation was visiting, the Danish prisoners would be set
up for housekeeping and then herded back to the barracks after they
left.
Danish Jews had a unique experience. First the Danes made a
remarkable effort to rescue their citizens from the roundup. Of the over
7,000 Jews in Denmark on the day of the roundup only 470 were found.
Most of those were found far from Copenhagen where they had not received
a warning in time to escape; the others were largely elderly residents
of a nursing home in Copenhagen. Once the roundup was complete, King
Christian X negotiated with Eric Himmler to
insure the safe keeping of ''his Jews.'' Throughout the war, Danish
citizens cared for the homes of their neighbors and sent them packages
of food through the Red Cross.
Finally, King Christian X negotiated for their release and sent
''white buses'' through enemy lines to bring them to Sweden where it was
agreed that they would sly in a dormitory until the war was over. On
April 15, 1945 the buses arrived at Theresienstadt and loaded up the
remaining Jews. Horst was carried onto the bus on a stretcher because
only one week before, he had had an emergency appendectomy performed
by a fellow doctor/prisoner on a barrack table with
only a kitchen knife and no anesthesia to do the job.
Thereseinstadt was liberated two weeks
later, and six weeks later Horst and the others were allowed to leave
the Swedish dormitory. Horst went to a displaced persons camp where he
met Cecilia Altberger from Hungary. She had
been released from a death camp. The two were married and moved to
Detroit, Michigan where the Jewish community there was sponsoring
refugees. Horst set up a business remodeling homes.
Interestingly, Horst has returned several times since the fall of the
Berlin Wall (1989) to his boyhood home in the former East
Germany. As with a number of
European towns, the community researched the Jews who once lived there.
