The Unwelcome One

Before the war, there had been 11 Jewish families, 50 people in all, in the small German town of Schmallenberg. But when Hans Frankenthal returned in 1945 at the age of 19, orphaned and robbed of his youth by the Nazis, he found that all the Jews of Schmallenberg had disappeared - no one who remained was interested in what had happened to them or to him. Here, Frankenthal tells his story of the horrors of the Holocaust survived by one man, and its aftermath. Summoning the vanished world of Jewish livestock dealers in rural Germany, the milieu of his boyhood, Frankenthal paints a clear picture of what it was like to live as a Jew in a small German town before and after the Nazis came to power. He gives a harrowing account of his family's deportation to Auschwitz and of his ""life"" and his brother's as slave labourers in an I.G. Farben factory near the death camp where his parents perished. When, acting on his father's last words to him, Frankenthal returns to his hometown, we get a rare firsthand look at the postwar experience of a Jewish survivor in small-town Germany. A sobering snapshot of a reckoning denied and delayed, Frankenthal's account of his own postwar trials and of his fellow citizens' reactions to the Jewish tragedy is an important reminder of how much of history resides in one person's story, and how much depends on our willingness to hear it.