How a German Officer Saved My Family

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we got on the train so we went from Antwerp to Brussels which is on a short train ride and the train that we were taking was the Berlin Paris Express so the train was coming from Berlin it was midnight cold cold winter and we got on the train with our suitcase and you know these long-term trends you had a long hallway and then you had these compartments so my mom open compartments and they were Germans sitting because that kind of the train came from Berlin there were maybe three people in an eight-person compartment but the minute she open the door that said nein nein nein so they didn't want anybody and that went on we were in this one car in this one train car and then nobody would let us in and there were many people in the in the hall you know so we sat down on a suitcase which is what you know but when witness when the train started moving it got to be very very cold because the air was blowing through and we were freezing so mom in her impeccable German opened opened the door and said would you be willing to let our children come and sit with you it's very cold out there and they're very uncomfortable there was a man a German soldier who was probably a little older I don't know how old he was but he would probably have been in his 40s and another man and maybe a woman there were three people and this man said oh how many are you and she said well there's our children and my husband and me okay why don't you just come on in and so the four of us with a suitcase went in and we sat down and my mom started talking with him and he was telling us that he had gone to home to Germany on on a furlough and he had loved seeing his family and he was very sad because he had to go back to Paris and sort of you you had the effect that he wasn't all that enchanted with the you know the opportunity to go to Paris he wanted to be home with his family and I don't really remember anything about the other two people but then he was very bright and as was my mother so they started talking about all that my mom had read German literature and she knew about German classical music or whatever so they were having this wonderful conversation dad kept his mouth shut because that would have come up with some units here and there and my sister and I didn't see anything either although both of us understood what was going on and then the train stopped and it was between on the border between Belgium and France and so the guy said all will you know it's it's control so the the door opens and there's this young German guy who says okay papers but he didn't mean the other folks he meant us so dad presents him with this document that he had bought you know gotten God looks at it looks at it looks at it and he says at first emptier licked which means there's something wrong here he says to dad I want to see your passport and so dad goes into his pocket you know he says gee I don't have it on me maybe it's in my suitcase and he takes down his suitcase and starts looking in the suitcase and I was panic-stricken and I thought why on earth did he not keep track of his passport and he kept looking and he says gee I don't know where it is I was looking he's looking and after I don't know how long the German officer said to the young man just go there okay and he said like that and he walks out I found out later on that my father did not find one to find his passport it was a Polish passport and he had another ID that had a Jew number on it he didn't want anything to show other than that paper which he thought was going to be and so the irony there he we would have been pulled off the train and the irony there was that our lives were saved by German officer you

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Channel: Yiddish Book Center

Views: 532,568

Rating: 4.8575344 out of 5

Keywords: family, soldier, train, france, belgium, berlin, winter, german, world war two, older country, holocaust, immigration/migration

Id: 0R8_cTt2kzI

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2011

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