Monday, September 20, 2010

The Story of a Communist „Schindler“

 The German who sheltered hundreds of Jews in the Nazi inferno
By Joseph Algazi (Galili) (former Ha'aretz reporter)
Kol ha-‘Am, 27 September 1964
Hebrew Original:
 
In the city of Lod in Israel lives a Jewish woman who is now reliving the story, full of hardship and grief, of her life during the years of the Second World War. In this dark story appears a prominent beam of light in the form of a German to whom she owes her life. The German, Bernhard Falkenberg, who lives today in East Berlin in the DDR (The German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany, which existed between the years 1949-1990 – trans.) saved many Jews in the city of Wlodawa in Poland, including Grete Rotstein (Burger) of Lod, and he also helped the partisans in the forests. Falkenberg was subsequently caught by the Nazis and sent to the Mauthausen death camp, where he was imprisoned until the end of the war.