The Unwelcome One: Returning Home from Auschwitz (Jewish Lives) - Hardcover

Hans Frankenthal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810118521 ISBN 13: 9780810118522

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Before the war, there had been 11 Jewish families, 50 people in all, in the small German town of Schmallenberg. But when Hans Frankenthal returned in 1945 at the age of 19, orphaned and robbed of his youth by the Nazis, he found that all the Jews of Schmallenberg had disappeared - no one who remained was interested in what had happened to them or to him. Here, Frankenthal tells his story of the horrors of the Holocaust survived by one man, and its aftermath. 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"" and his brother's as slave labourers 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 postwar experience of a Jewish survivor in small-town Germany. A sobering snapshot of a reckoning denied and delayed, Frankenthal's account of his own postwar trials and of his fellow citizens' reactions 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

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.

About the Author:

HANS FRANKENTHAL was born in 1926 in Schmalienberg in the Sauerland region of Germany. In 1943, his family was deported to Auschwitz, where his parents were sent at once to the gas chambers. Hans and his brother Ernst survived slave labor in the Monowitz and Mittelbau Dora concentration camps. Liberated by the Red Army in 1945, Frankenthal returned to Schmallenberg, where he ran a butcher shop and worked as a livestock dealer. He died in December 1999. JOHN A. BROADWIN is also the translator of Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany (2001), Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance (1998) and co-translator of Invisible Walls and To Remember is to Heal (1999) all published by Northwestern University Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0810118521
• ISBN 13: 9780810118522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184