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“One Out of One Hundred ”
- Northwestern University Press
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176 First Name: Kurt Last Name: Gutfreund Date of Birth: January 6, 1938 City of Birth: Vienna Country of Birth: Austria As told to Elaine Saphier Fox “One Out of One Hundred” Kurt Gutfreund Vienna Thousands of children were incarcerated with their families between 1942 and 1945 in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp. According to a quote from I Never Saw Another Butterfly, written by Hana Volavkova, only an estimated one hundred children survived Theresienstadt, while Yad Vashem estimates 1,234 children survived . I, Kurt Gutfreund, am one of those surviving children. I was born in Vienna, Austria, on January 6, 1938, just two months before the Nazis invaded Austria on March 11, 1938. My father, Heinrich Gutfreund, a goldsmith , and my mother, Hildegard Grasel, who had been voted the prettiest shop salesclerk in Vienna, were both Viennese and German-speaking. Father went to trade school and Mother attended high school. My parents both enjoyed music. Mother loved opera and the theater. They loved each other dearly and had a wonderful marriage until the Nazis intervened. They were not religious Jews, but I had a bris (circumcision rite), and we observed the High Holidays. Father’s relatives were Jewish on both sides of the family, whereas only Mother’s mother, Hermine Abeles, was Jewish. She married Otto Grasel, a Catholic who was a newspaper journalist. Under the Nuremberg Laws promulgated in 1935, my maternal grandparents’ mixed marriage made my mother a Mischling, a “mixed breed” In Concentration Camps 177 and not a pure Aryan. Another law later required that all Jews wear a yellow Jewish star on their outer clothing. At first, Father thought we were safe from arrest and deportation because we were Viennese. During my mother’s pregnancy with me, my father had a stroke, which permanently disabled him and prohibited him from working. He was still hospitalized when I was born. By necessity, Mother worked to support our family. Some people remember Father picking me up from kindergarten and recall that he had a lame arm. I have no recollection of my father, kindergarten, or anything else concerning my first few years in Vienna. Subsequently, I have learned that I had a kindergarten friend, Peter, and we were both noted for crying the loudest in class. Mother, whom I called Mamschi, often told me how Father adored me. I only know what Mamschi or others told me about Father and my early life. Mamschi related an incident about my first encounter with a Nazi. I was a blond, curly-headed two-year-old playing in a nearby park. A Nazi soldier walking by stopped, approached me, and told me I was cute. According to Mamschi, I replied, “Don’t touch me, I am a Jew.” Mamschi never told me what his reaction was, and I don’t remember. In another incident that did not turn out as well, a Nazi ordered Mamschi’s sister Aunt Hermine and her husband to clean the streets with a toothbrush . Shortly thereafter, they fled to Bogotá, Colombia. Recognizing the gravity of the situation for the Jews, Father instructed Mamschi that “the little boy must live.” In June 1942, when I was almost five years old, upon returning to our apartment from an outing, Mamschi noticed police nearby. Waiting until they were gone, she returned to the apartment and found a note on our apartment door. The Nazis had arrested Father. On June 15, 1942, according to official records, he was shipped “east,” deported with nine thousand other Viennese Jews to Maly Trostinec, a death camp near Minsk, Russia, on a par with or worse than Auschwitz. In 1941, Maly Trostinec was established as an extermination camp. As I learned later, transports of Viennese Jews began in May 1942 and continued through October 1942. Jews were taken directly from the trains onto trucks and transported to an execution site in the nearby forest, where five squads shot them into pits. Despite his disability and religion, Mamschi kept up her hope that Father would return. He was not among the seventeen who survived. People who could not work were the first to be liquidated. After his deportation, we immediately went “underground.” For a few months we lived in several different apartments with increasingly more people in each apartment. Because I was only four years old, I don’t remember the apartments’ locations. We lived in the Jewish section, the second district; so I assume that is where we remained. Mamschi hoped that because...