Auschwitz survivor's decades-long journey back to Germany
After Auschwitz survivor Albrecht Weinberg left his German hometown of Leer behind, it took him more than 60 years to settle in the country of his birth again.
"Nothing was keeping us in Germany," the 99-year-old told AFP about his decades-long exile in the United States, where he emigrated after Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945.
In the industrial-scale mass murder of the Holocaust, he told AFP, "my whole family, more than 40 people, were murdered".
"My father was a German soldier in the First World War, someone who dedicated his life to his country, and they sent him into a gas chamber."
Weinberg, whose 100th birthday falls on March 7, cut a fragile figure as he told AFP about the horrors he endured and fled, and his long journey back to the country of his youth.
For decades while he lived in New York, he didn't want to speak about Germany or about Leer, the northern small town of 35,000 near the Dutch border.
Leaning on his walking frame, he showed AFP the outside of the Leer house where he grew up.
On the pavement outside are five so-called Stolpersteine or "stumbling blocks" -- brass plaques recalling the deportation of his entire family to the Nazi camps.
His parents perished in them, but Albrecht and his two siblings survived.
- 'Everything they did to us' -
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Albrecht had to leave the local school and attend a Jewish one instead.
The house built by his grandfather was expropriated, and his father had to give up his trade as a livestock dealer after losing too many customers.
Rounded up by the Nazis, all three siblings were sent to Auschwitz in what was Nazi-occupied Poland.
Albrecht and his brother Dieter survived slave labour in horrific conditions in the Monowitz-Buna sub-camp, where detainees had to work for the IG Farben chemicals company.
His sister Friedel was sent to another part of Auschwitz.
After Auschwitz's liberation, the siblings initially remained in Germany.
Dieter began a new relationship there, but was tragically killed in a road accident a year after the war ended.
After their brother's death there was nothing keeping Albrecht and Friedel in Germany and they started a new life in New York, where Albrecht worked as a butcher and mixed with other German Jewish exiles.
But for decades he steadfastly refused to talk about the horrors of the camps.
He declined to testify in trials of Nazis in Germany and also said no to an interview request from film director Steven Spielberg.
In 1985 Albrecht and Friedel received a letter from the mayor of Leer inviting them to visit.
The letter disappeared into a drawer.
Weinberg recalled his first reaction to the invitation: "After everything they did to us, I'm not going back to Germany."
- Return with mixed feelings -
His stance softened when a German teacher asked Albrecht and Friedel to come and sent them a photo of the children at the Jewish school they attended.
That first journey back to Germany left Weinberger with mixed feelings.
Weinberger said that on meeting a new generation of Germans, "we realised that these young people were normal".
"They welcomed us in a way that I never experienced in my childhood, when everyone my age was in the Nazi youth organisations," he said.
Some of them became Albrecht's friends and they even holidayed together.
But an older guest at a dinner Weinberg attended in Germany left a very different impression when she said: "We had the best times of our lives under Hitler."
"For me they were the worst," Weinberg recalled saying before getting up to leave.
More than 20 years would pass before he made the decision to move back to Leer for good.
When Friedel fell seriously ill, their German friends convinced them that they could access better care in Germany.
- 'Don't let memory fade' -
Her death a few months after their return was a grievous blow for Albrecht.
He never married or had children, and Friedel had been his only family.
But a new friendship helped him in his grief: that of Gerda Daenekas, a geriatric nurse.
After her husband died, Weinberg moved into her apartment, just a few kilometres from his childhood home.
With her, he has finally been talking about his painful past.
He talks about his experiences in schools and has even done so at BASF, one of the successor companies to IG Farben.
A secondary school near Leer has been renamed in his honour and he says that talking to students about the Holocaust has become important to him.
In a book co-authored with a German journalist he said he talked about his story "so that the memory doesn't fade like the number on my arm".
Now he tells the students he meets: "Don't let yourselves be intimidated if you're not happy with something."
"As for us, we had no choice."
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