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An Unexpected Letter
"It was the summer of 1997 when I received an unexpected letter and a picture from a former non-Jewish playmate. The picture…was of a group of neighborhood youngsters near where we lived in Bremen, my hometown [in Germany]….It was taken [in 1929] before Hitler came to power, when Jewish and non-Jewish children still played together.
[That summer] I had visited Bremen at the invitation of the city. This playmate of mine, Gunther, wrote me that he had missed meeting me during my stay, but had wanted to show me that in our early lives we had been good friends….He wanted to assure me that he had never ‘touched a Jew.’ His parents had owned a cleaning store right next to my father’s business and we frequently met as children. He knew my family and knew that my mother had been murdered by Nazis during Kristallnacht. He might have felt bad about that.
After more than half a century, you can say many things. I answered him that I remembered well our encounters before the war. We were a happy-go-lucky group, never thinking of harming each other. But I was interested in his life after Hitler came to power…. The answer was shocking. He wrote that he had been a guard in Bergen-Belsen [concentration camp]. Again, though, he assured me that he ‘never touched a Jew.’ What I wanted to hear from Gunther was how he felt about his job. Did he think that killing Jews was the proper thing to do?...He never wrote to me again.” —Rabbi Jacob Wiener (born Gerd Zwienicki)"
http://somewereneighbors.ushmm.org/#/exhibitions/friends/un2649/description
To the left is a short story from the Holocaust Museum. This story shows how many friends were lost beacuse of the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust many young boys of different faith were friendly and played in the streets while their parents worked. During the Holocaust, friends that were of a religon other than Judaism were forced to help the Nazis wipe out the Jews. In the letter above, a man now finally writes to his Jewish friend centuries later as a man instead of a boy. This man was reassuring his old friend that he was at the concentration camps, but never touched a Jew. The Jewish boy wrote back finally to his previous friend before the camps and he asked a question to his friend. The non Jewish boy never wrote back. This shows thta when he was put in an uncomfortable situatuation, he just avoided it. In the end, they never spoke to one another again. In the end,
The Picture above shows the boys from "An Unexpected Letter"
A. Neijna