Before the war, there had been eleven Jewish families, fifty people in all, in the small German town of Schmallenberg. But when Hans Frankenthal returned in 1945 at the age of nineteen, orphaned and robbed of his youth by the Nazis, he found that all the Jews of Schmallenberg had disappeared too-and no one who remained cared to hear what had happened to them, or to him. Here, Frankenthal tells his story-of the horrors of the Holocaust survived by one man, but also of its aftermath, observed by an unwelcome witness to Schmallenberg's, and Germany's, shameful past.
Summoning the vanished world of Jewish livestock dealers in rural Germany, the milieu of his boyhood, Frankenthal paints a clear picture of what it was like to live as a Jew in a small German town before and after the Nazis came to power. He gives a harrowing account of his family's deportation to Auschwitz and of his "life" with his brother as slave laborers in an I. G. Farben factory near the death camp where his parents perished. When, acting on his father's last words to him, Frankenthal returns to his hometown, we get a rare firsthand look at the post-war experience of a Jewish survivor in small-town Germany. A sobering snapshot of the larger reckoning denied and delayed, Frankenthal's account of his own post-war trials and of his fellow citizens' reaction to the Jewish tragedy is an important reminder of how much of history resides in one person's story, and how much depends on our willingness to hear it.