IF YOU DON'T GET TOUGH, IT'S ALMOST UNBEARABLE

Persecution: A Jewish family from Wertheim writes a letter from the Gurs concentration camp about their every day life in the Gurs concentration camp.

Deportation first in 1940 to the French internment camp Gurs Southern France, then eastward in 1942, to death: end of the more then 700 year history of the Jewish community in Wertheim is violent and brutal.

The Wertheim teacher, Dieter Fauth, has made it his task to keep people's memories alive. He knows the name of each and everyone who has been torn from everyday life in Wertheim by deportation or flight.  With his students, he traced their stories and supported the laying of the stumbling blocks in front of their former homes. His commitment has trust in the descendants of the few survivors and new sources open up.

This includes a box in which Max Bruckheimer kept letters from this period after fleeing to the USA. The descendants of the Wertheim families Bruckheimer and Schwarzschild call this box the holocaust box. A graddaughter of Max Bruckheimer has been evaluating the letters for about six months. She entrusted Dieter Fauth with the publication of one of them, the content of which is unknown in the region today.

He transcribed , filed, and annotated the letter.

The granddaughter does not want her name published, nor does the family want to show current photos, says Fauth. The holocaust is still a family burden.

 

FULL OF HOPE UNTIL THE END. This is how two Wertheimer families experienced the camp until the end. In April, 1942, members of two Wertheim families wrote this letter to their relatives in the USA who managed to escape. About four months later the letter writers were taken to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe and murdered. Numerous letters from Gurs to the USA have survived in the collection of the Bruckheimer/Schwarzschild family in the USA, called the holocaust box, from which this letter came. You can see from them that many letters from the relative in the USA also arrived at the Gurs camp. An exchange of letters to the USA was apparently possible, while in Wertheim not a single letter from Gurs to Germany is known.

However, the letters had to be written in Gurs under the most difficult of circumstances. The inmates lacked money, including postage costs. Paper was also scarce. With the letter published here, every corner of the paper is written on a single sheet, front and back, across and overhead, every corner of the paper was described by a total of five people. The writers are Selma Bruckheimer from Wertheim, Frieda Wolf, nee Adler (1883), a still unknown, probably older woman named Sophie Schwarzschild, nee Bruckheimer, and her husband Adolf Schwarzschild. Addressees are Selmas young brother Max and his wife Hilde, nee Schwarzschild, Adolf's daughter.  But all members of the Bruckheimer and Schwarzschild families and all acquaintances from home who managed to escape to the USA.

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The letter shows how intensively the members of the shattered Jewish community of Wertheim are in contact worldwide. This is how the refugees in the USA learn about the prisoners in Gurs for example the current ones from Wertheimers in Israel.

The letter published here is deliberately printed in its entirety, even with passages that may seem banal. Imagine that the letter writers have already had two winters in unheated barracks with catastrophic sanitary conditions, spent in mud and dirt, were exposed to unimaginable conditions for 18 months already. Loved ones around them have died. Nevertheless, they are open to each other if they are more interested in the life of their relatives in the USA, they are happy with them about the life going on there than they allow themselves to be taken over by their own misery. This is as astonishing as it is admirable. When the letter was written it was April 1942 and it was gradually getting warmer, although it was still raining a lot and the roads were muddy. Nevertheless, there is something like relief in view of the rising heat. As this letter shows, the miserable people have not yet lost their interest in the outside world and the hope of leaving and and seeing them again in the USA. But only about four months later they were all murdered.

Dieter Fauth....

 

 

Background (top right of article): The Gurs concentration camp. The Gurs concentration camp was used by Nazi Germany in conjunction with the collaborating part of France, the so called Vichy regime, for the internment of Jews. This was also prepared by a French Jewish statute and a law on the internment of Jews in France dated April 3.  October 1940 - The camp is located north of the Pyrenees about 40 kilometers from the Spar border and about 60 kilometer west of Walfahrtsorters Lourdes.