“I wanted to live,” Aba Naor said when asked how he survived four years in Nazi camps. “I didn’t want to die. It was easy to die, but much harder – to stay alive. Maybe that’s what motivates me, and I can be very persistent,” he recalls. “And it’s good that I was like that: today I have 11 great-grandchildren. This is my fortune,” they write.Deutsche says“.
Naor, 93 today, travels every year from Israel to his second homeland, Germany. And in particular to Munich. He spent several months there and did what he considered his duty: he recounted his memories of the time he spent in the Nazi meat grinder. And about how she ruined his family.
Naor: “We were proud to be Lithuanians”
Naor was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Lithuania. “I had a happy childhood,” he said, adding: “We were proud to be Lithuanian. True, there was some anti-Semitism, but it was not strong.”
Naor was 13 when the Wehrmacht entered Lithuania, which was under Soviet occupation at the time. Jews from his hometown of Kaunas were deported to the ghetto, and Naor’s 23-member family was initially housed in a one-bedroom apartment, but later found themselves in the ghetto. And there was real horror. Aba Naor’s older brother was quickly killed by the Nazis – he was shot dead along with other young people who tried to get extra food because there was not enough in the ghetto. However, his departure was strictly forbidden. “For a long time, my parents could not believe that he would not return. Until then, no one could have imagined that they were shooting children.”
Naor’s family lived in the Kaunas ghetto for three years. In July 1944, Naor, his parents and younger brother were deported to the German concentration camp Stutthof, near Gdansk. “In Stutthof, the dogs lived better than we did,” Naor said. There, men were separated from women and children.
On July 26, 1944, Naor, then 16, watched as his mother and younger brother were led beyond the fence with the other women and children. “I knew right away that I was seeing them for the last time,” he recalled. The same day, Aba Naor’s mother and his younger brother were taken to Auschwitz and killed. She was 38 at the time and Naor’s brother was only six.
Irmgard F. – on the other side of the fence
Irmgard F., then 19, was probably in the camp that day – but on the other side of the fence. She was the secretary of the camp commander, Paul-Werner Hope. On Thursday (September 30), 80 years later, Irmgard F. had to stand trial in the German city of Itzehoe. The prosecution accused her of “as a secretary and typist in the Stutthof concentration camp between June 1943 and April 1945, assisting those responsible in the camp in the systematic killing of detainees.” Irmgard F., now 96, is accused of complicity in the murder of more than 11,000 people. Today, however, she did not appear in court.
Irmgard F. has already testified in court twice. However, she claims that she only wrote under the dictation of the commandant and did not know anything about the tens of thousands of murders committed near her.
“The process is too late”
Naor believes that this process is too late. It was right to leave the old woman alone, especially since “the really big fish were left free.” If she was really guilty, why was she released so far, Naor asks, saying he thinks it’s a much harsher punishment to stay free with the knowledge that you’ve committed a crime than to be sent to prison.
However, many Holocaust survivors view the issue differently. Lawyer Onur Yozata, who represents a number of co-prosecutors in the trial, says they were not driven by a desire for revenge. It is much more important for survivors to tell their story in court. Many of them say, “We don’t want our destinies to be forgotten.”
Naor was not only in the Stutthof concentration camp. He was later sent to two forced labor camps in Bavaria. After their liberation from the Americans, he left for Israel, but for decades did not talk about the suffering he experienced.
Only after some time did Aba Naor manage to find a way to overcome this dark past – in his meetings with hundreds of students, to whom he told his story. “Children are my therapists, they give me the strength to go back through my memories of this past. I think it is our duty to remind him of it, to explain to young people what can happen if people are not careful.” says Naor.
And in the video above, see the story of 92-year-old Bulgarian Jew Avram Mercado Nathan, when he remembers World War II.
