With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 childhood-trauma alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany childhood-surival-story
Current interventions in use with children include psycho-pharmacological treatments, play therapy, psychological debriefing and testimony therapy, but this was Nazi Germany in 1945!
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany germany-1945 nazi-german-1945 psycho-pharmalogical
Later, I started to understand just why these children ‘hated’ us other children. I understood that they did not, in fact, hate ‘us’, but hated the fact that we were German and spoke in a language that they associated with pain, fear and the loss of their parents, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, their whole families, in fact. Once I understood this it affected me in all sorts of subconscious ways, ways that were to blight my life for many years and make me deny my German birth.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany
The fact is that many people did not – and still do not – understand that many Germans were held in the concentration camps from 1933 onwards. The camps were not just for Jews or other ‘non-people’, but also for any German who had made some remark about the Nazis, or who would not follow the Nazi rules.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii nazis hitler ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany german-concentration-camps
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