Dokumente zu Gedenkstätten des Verlorenen Transports

aus: www.kosovoholocaust.com/page57/page57.html

1. Abschnitt: Konzentrationslager Bergen Belsen
2. Abschnitt: Verlorener Transport und Befreiung in Tröbitz

"WHITE DEATH" IN BERGEN-BELSEN

I saw Hebrew letters for the first time in my life, written in the sand of Bergen-Belsen. It was also here that I heard for the first time ever the melody of a Hebrew song about Trumpeldor, the one-armed hero who was killed in Tel Hai, a pioneer settlement in northern Galilee.

During the first months in the camp, when it was still tolerable, the children were gathered together by a young rabbi from Pristina, Josip Levi, and a teacher, Hanna Levi (later Hass) from Sarajevo. They taught us the Hebrew alphabet in the sand in the camp. But all of this didn't last long. There were many rumors and various theories about why they didn't kill us all. One of them was that as "Albanians" we were citizens of a country which was Germany's ally.
Another was that the Germans kept us in order to exchange us for their own people taken prisoner by the Allies. The truth was that Himmler had planned Bergen-Belsen as a collection camp for various purposes, including the possibility of exchanges.
Bergen-Belsen was divided into several camps by barbed wire fences. The high outer fence which surrounded the whole camp was studded with high watchtowers with heavy machine-guns and spot- lights. Small black boards with a skull and crossbones in white hung on the fence. "Anyone approaching will be killed without warning" read the boards in German. We were all put together in what they called the Sternlager (Star Camp). Women and children were in one barracks, men in another, but in the same camp. They put us in barracks number 8. In the very first days they gave us six-pointed Stars of David, made from yellow cloth. In the middle of them was the word Jude (Jew). The Dutch Jews who were already in the camp when we arrived had the same yellow star, but theirs read Jood, in Dutch. Mother somehow sewed these yellow symbols onto our clothes as they ordered. We were not allowed to move around the camp without them. At the barracks entrance there was a space with a table and sever- al wooden chairs. The remaining space was occupied by wooden bunk beds. Several months later, when more convoys arrived, surviving inmates evacuated from camps in the east, the space was even more crowded. A third tier was added to the wooden beds. The space was really cramped. In the end, more than four hundred people were living in barracks meant for a hundred. Everyone had a space about half a metre wide in which to lie. We slept pressed up against one another, with no chance of turning over.

At the beginning, things somehow were all right. However, after a few months, when the bad dysentery began and a serious typhus epidemic, the situation was terrible. Because the people were so weak they couldn't go outside to relieve themselves so it was pouring from the upper bunks onto those below. There were also some horrifying moments when someone's neighbour in the bed would die without anyone noticing. Sometimes this would even be a brother or sister, a father or mother. At the beginning my father tried to function as a doctor in the camp. But within just a few weeks he was so weak because of his ulcer that he spent most of his time lying down and rarely left the barracks, and then only with the help of my mother.
We stood on the Appellplatz, the parade ground, for hours. The heads of the barracks would line us up. One of the SS men, on a bicycle, tried to put the ranks into straight lines. God help anyone who got out of this line! Blows would rain down on them. After that they would count us. And of course they'd never get the right number of inmates. There were always people missing, either because they were exhausted and unable to leave the barracks, or because they were already dead in some corner. It was always a long time before they got things cleared up. And so we would stand there, endlessly, in the rain, snow and cold until the numbers somehow added up. These Appells were a typical combination of Nazi sadism and German pedantry. Up until September or October, everything somehow proceeded "normally".
We received our daily meals. In the morning this was some muddy coffee substitute, at noon a clear soup with a piece of potato or mangel-wurzel floating here and there. Late in the afternoon they would give us something which was supposed to be tea. Along with this was our daily meal of a two-centimetre thick slice of bread and a piece of margarine. From the end of autumn until the liberation, the situa- tion in the camp became more and more difficult and unbearable.

Especially after the arrival of the new commandant, Josip Kremer, a former Auschwitz commandant. Everything broke down and became general chaos and a nightmare. The camp command was out of con- trol, supplies no longer arrived. The daily bread ration was cut sud- denly to the size of a box of matches. Instead of a two-centimetre slice of bread we got one centimetre a day; instead of two watered-down soups with mangel-wurzel we now got just one. And then not even that. There were also some days and weeks when we would get nothing. At the beginning, while it was still possible, the adult men were taken to work in a nearby forest outside the camp. Virtually barehanded they had to uproot tree stumps to be used as firewood by the German population in the surrounding settlements.
Women and children were put to work picking apart old, worn-out shoes which were brought to the camp in large heaps. The parts of these shoes which could still be used were made into some kind of primitive footwear with wooden soles for the inmates to wear. Some of us were given those typically Dutch wooden peasant clogs. They were heavy and it wasn't easy to walk in them. People dragged their feet. However they had the advantage that on cold days they could be lined with rags to somehow keep the feet warm. Hunger was our greatest, and probably our only obsession. We would sneak around the camp for hours looking for scraps of food.

Sometimes we looked at our Dutch neighbours and our peers in that part of the camp with envy. At least at the beginning they tried to keep to their daily routine and ate their poor meals all together within the family. On small wooden boards they would very neatly share their daily ration of bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A small piece of bread for every meal. For us Balkan types there was always the dilemma of whether to eat this daily ration all at once as soon as we received it. In this way we would feel that our mouths were full, even if just for a moment. Or should we leave part of the meal for the evening as the Dutch did? While they were still giving us mangelwurzel soup, we children tried to hit the jackpot: after this watery soup was doled out we'd lie in wait for the empty vats which we would return to the camp kitchen across from the entrance to our section of the camp and out- side the barbed wire. This was an opportunity for us to lick the remains of the soup from inside the vat. And, even more important, to steal a piece or two of the mangelwurzels piled in great heaps in front of the camp kitchen.
During the first months we also used to be given pickled forest snails. These were given to us from wooden barrels. At first no one could eat them because of the strong smell of this unusual food. Later they became the camp delicacy. A rare portion of protein. We used to use pickled snails and mangel-wurzel cut into pieces to make a kind of pate. But this soon came to an end. I have never come across these pickled snails again anywhere else. The most important ritual for the inmates was when they would bring to the barracks several square loaves of bread, which contained more sawdust than flour and the head of the barracks would cut them using an improvised knife, a sharpened fork handle in fact. All the inmates who could still stand on their feet would gather around the table at the barracks entrance and watch carefully while the Blockalteste, the block supervisor, would measure the slices with a primitive ruler to make sure he didn't give anyone a millimetre less. Measuring the ends of these square loaves was always a problem. This piece of bread was the measure for everything. It was a kind of camp currency for the most primitive kind of barter. For a daily ration of bread, devoted smokers could get four of the cigarettes which the resourceful managed to obtain from the Nazi guards or the support staff at the camp. Even a shabby coat and other similar items could be had for bread.

While I was still somehow able to move around I spent most of my time in the camp collecting cigarette butts from the German guards. This was for my father who was a passionate smoker. At the beginning I managed to get him some Machorka tobacco from the Russian pris- oners who worked in the camp kitchen. For hours I would walk through the camp compound looking down at the ground and collecting butts. This became almost an instinctive habit. For a long time after the liberation I would instinctively bend down whenever I would see a butt on the ground. It took me quite a while to break this habit. I don't remember whether I ever looked the SS men in the face while I was in the camp. If I had been called on to identify any of these criminals after the war 1 would probably not have been able to. I don't remember even one of their faces.

Near our camp there was a women's camp for those who had survived the Auschwitz Death March. They arrived at the beginning of 1945. Their hair was shorn, they were wrapped in rags and scraps of striped dresses. This camp was run by SS women who were extremely cruel. One scene which I saw across the barbed wire remains etched in my memory. The SS supervisor was furiously beating a woman, an inmate, with a plaited whip. The blows were dreadful and the poor woman fell on the ground squirming. And still the SS woman continued kicking her with her black boots, aiming for the most vulnerable parts of the body. As I watched this terrible scene I wondered how one woman could beat another so badly.
For me, hunger remains the overriding phenomenon of the days in the camp. Exhausting, chronic hunger which went on for months. The stomach is empty and the head thinks only of food. Everything else is eliminated from the mind. And on it goes, one day after anoth- er. Nobody who hasn't actually experienced it could understand this feeling. Everyone moved around the camp like ghosts. People with swollen stomachs, hollow cheeks and wide-open rheumy eyes. Feeble, completely apathetic to the surroundings and to the people closest to them. The "hunger syndrome" consisted of putrid, purulent boils.
Human dignity began to vanish. Musulmani, living skeletons. We were almost naked because the clothes we had brought with us very quickly wore out. The dirt and the dysentery left their unbearable traces. The stench was everywhere, the dreadful faecal stink. The primitive toilets were flooded, pouring from the barracks down the camp paths. Everywhere. Everything was mixed together. The dead and the living. It was impossible to walk without stepping on a corpse or a puddle of faeces and urine. There was total apathy. Some lay exhausted, unable to move. Others crept around the camp like ghosts, with no kind of con- nection to other people. Lice everywhere. These grey vermin multi- plied at incredible speed. They nested in every seam of our ragged clothing and on every hair on our bodies. We were skin and bones, but the lice kept growing fat on our blood. In the beginning we tried to pick them off as an important part of our daily routine in the camp. We would look for them in the seams of our clothes and crush them with our nails. It was a Sisyphean labour. But our strength gave out and the lice won. Everyone was too exhausted to get rid of them. The woisi came after death. When someone died the lice, accustomed to the warmth of the human body, would crawl out to the surface of tin- corpse, covering it with a grey, vibrating layer. This was the surest sign that someone had finally died. Because quite often people who wen alive looked as though they were dead.

This was a kind of "white death" from lice. The winter of 1944-45 was a season from hell. The typhus raged. Dozens, hundreds of people died every day. In the last three months before the liberation about 45,000 people died in the camp. The camp crematorium worked day and night and was still unable to cremate all the victims. There were bodies piled up beside the barracks. They were stacked like logs at a stake, petrol was poured over them and they were burned. These piles of human bodies would burn for days. The awful stench of death, of burning human bodies, flooded the camp.

During these last months, the German order was falling apart. The camp administration no longer took care of anything. The SS men rarely appeared in the camp. Germany was falling apart. The camp was falling apart. While there was order they were killing systematically. Now, in disorder, people were dying on a massive scale. The result was the same. In the most difficult days, when everything was falling apart around us, my family tried somehow to stay together. Mainly thanks to my mother. In these circumstances this was no easy task. Staying together was perhaps the most uplifting sign that we still maintained our human dignity. Sometimes hope came to us from the skies. In the distance we would hear the buzzing of the Allied bombers' heavy engines and then the dull explosions of the bombs on Hanover and other industrial regions of northern Germany. When the wind was kind to us the nar- row ribbons of silver paper dropped by the Allied aircraft to confuse the German radar would drift into the camp. These were signs that the end of the war was growing closer. When English units liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1944, they immediately realised that it was impossible to clean and disinfect the camp. Those inmates who had survived were moved to a nearby German Army camp. Bulldozers were used to bury thousands of unidentified bodies in mass graves and the Bergen-Belsen camp itself was razed to the ground using military flamethrowers. We were not there at the time.

Lost Train, Tröbitz, Mühlberg

One day in April we were told that all who could still move should prepare for transport. The reason for this German decision, just days before the liberation, remains unclear. Himmler or someone else had plans for us in those last days of the Third Reich.

And so, at the beginning of April 1945, three convoys were evacuated from our Sternlager. Mainly towards the south-east. The first convoy reached Theresienstadt, the second was liberated by the Americans at Magdeburg. We were in the third convoy. On April 10, five days before the liberation of the camp, we were ordered to go to a railway crossing gate, about ten kilometres from the camp.

At the end of March, my mother had contracted typhus! She could walk only with great difficulty. I carried her to the train on my back so that we would not have to part. My father, who was 54 at the time, looked as if he was a hundred years old, but he somehow dragged himself along beside us. The fact that father and I survived (although by just a few days), the horrors of the camp is something which, above all, we owe to our mother. She was our anchor. She took care of us and of others, trying to find extra food. She made us trousers and shirts from wornout blankets. And, most important of all,by dint of great effort she preserved our dignity and the unity of our family under horrifying conditions when everything in the camp was falling apart.




They loaded about 2,400 of us, internees from Bergen-Belsen, Jews from Holland and Yugoslavia, some from Greece and France, into sixty wagons and, under SS escort, the transport set off on the night of April 10. And thus we began our journey of death through a ruined Germany which was already in flames. This train was later known as the "lost train". First we travelled via Lüneburg, to the north, towards Hamburg. Then this train, some six hundred metres long! turned south-east towards Berlin. Then again to the south, to the cities of Cottbus and Lübben, then west, not far from the river Elbe and the place where the Soviet and American troops met. This meandering through Germany in closed wagons, with no food or water, went on for about two weeks. Through the barbed wire over the wagon windows we saw smoke and heard explosions in the distance. Berlin was in flames under the attack of the Red Army. On the rare occasions when they allowed us out to search for water, we would throw the dead out beside the railway lines and try to bury them in shallow graves. During this nightmare journey I caught typhus and lived through all this in the delirium of high fever. My memories of it are all somewhat hazy.


During the night of April 23, our train stopped on the railway line out in the open. When the spring morning dawned, there were no longer any German guards around the train. There was a strange silence outside. And in the wagons the heavy smell of faeces, urine and death. Someone managed to get our wagons open. We crawled out. Because of my illness I could no longer walk and was crawling on my stomach. A few hours later someone shouted "Russians! Russians!" In the distance, as though in a dream or in the touching pathos of a Russian film, we saw a group of cavalry approaching. This was the advance contingent of the Red Army. We were free! Those who were able were shouting at the top of their voices and kissing the cavalry men and their horses.


A few months later, before they were repatriated to their countries, the Bergen-Belsen inmates who had survived sent Stalin a letter of thanks, typical of those enthusiastic days. "Each of us will tell our children and grandchildren, from generation to generation with deep gratitude, about these happy days of liberation by the victorious Red Army.
After unprecedented suffering we are returning to life as free people."

We were liberated near a place called Tröbitz, in the eastern part of Germany. Because the fighting was still going on, the Soviet soldiers had no time to concern themselves with us. They took our whole train to Tröbitz, expelled the German locals from their houses and moved us in to await the Soviet medical teams. Our liberators then continued their advance. Because we were so exhausted we weren't even able to rejoice at our freedom. But many of us, in our hunger, threw ourselves at the food we found in the houses. For some, this proved fatal. Some of these liberated camp internees died immediately after their liberation.




The medical teams arrived a day or two later. For fear that a typhus epi- demic would break out, all typhus sufferers were moved to field hospitals in the area, to some kind of quarantine. And thus my father, my mother and myself found ourselves near the village of Mühlberg in an army prison camp which had been converted into a field hospital. Our beds were right next to one another.


On the morning of April 29, six days after we were liberated, I woke up. My father was lying next to me, he wasn't moving. He had died in his sleep. I reacted almost hysterically, shouting "There is no God!" We buried my father that same day in a nearby prisoner-of-war cemetery in part of a forest.

Two German prisoners, escorted by a mounted Soviet guard, dug the grave. We lowered the coffin with my father's body into it. The two German prisoners were muttering something to each other. I thought they said something like "Der Verfluchte Jude". To this day I'm not certain whether I really hear, this or whether I just imagined it. I went to the guard on his horse and complained that the Germans were swearing about my dead father. The guard handed me the horsewhip he had in his hands. "Beat them," he said to me. I tried, but didn't have the strength. Then he took the whip back and started driving the Germans down the path, whipping them.



With a pencil I wrote my father's name on a board and put it down on the fresh grave.
Many years later, sometime in the second half of the 1980s, I was in East Berlin as an Israeli up resentative, attending an international congress of fighters agains fascism. I asked the organisers to help me look for my father's grave in tinpart of East Germany where we were liberated. My search for the grave took several days. And so we also arrived in the village of Mühlberg.

One of the older people remembered that there was a camp for prisoners of war in the area and that sick concentration camp internees had been accommodated there immediately after the war. He even remembered that there was a cemetery for prisoners of war. We went to find the spot where the camp stood. All that remained were the concrete foundations of the barracks, now overgrown with tall plants. We also found the place where the prisoners' cemetery was supposed to have been, the place where I had buried my father. But there was no longer a cemetery there, nor my father's grave.

They explained to me that there had been a flood in the area sometime in 1947, that the shallow graves were unearthed and that the bones of the dead had been scattered by the water. The remains were collected and buried in a common grave in the village cemetery with a small gravestone reading "Three thousand soldiers and officers of various nations who fought against Fascism and died for peace and freedom."
Not a word about Jewish victims! My father and the other victims from the "lost train" who were buried here were neither soldiers nor officers. They were just ordinary Jews. In that post-war chaos perhaps they didn't even know that they existed. And so I failed to find my father's grave in Germany. There were no graves in the Holocaust.


Many years later, going through lists at the Yad Vashem commemorative centre in Jerusalem, I learnt that my serial number in Bergen-Belsen was 4657 and that my parents' numbers were ahead of mine, my mother's was 4656 and my father's 4655.


On the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, in April 1995, a group of about two hundred people who had survived the "lost train" gathered in Bergen-Belsen, from Israel, Holland, the US and a few dozen Yugoslav survivors. After the moving meetings and commemoration we again travelled the route of the "lost train", but this time in buses.

And so, fifty years later, we once again arrived in Tröbitz. At the local cemetery in which some of the inmates were buried after the liberation, in a touching ceremony, we erected a memorial plaque in German and Hebrew with the names of the 320 "lost train" victims. Among them was the name of my father, Dr Yosef Teitelbaum.




A few weeks after my father's death, my mother and I decided not to wait for repatriation to be organised but to return to Prizren on our own. We were joined by Bela Abramovic of Pristina. And so we set off on a journey through Europe which lasted about a month. Instead of the yellow Star of David, my mother now sewed on our coats the Yugoslav tricolour flag with the five-pointed star in the middle. This was the custom among the many prisoners and camp internees liberated in Germany, everyone wearing their own flag. At that time Yugoslavia and Tito opened all doors, better than any valid visa. On Russian heavy artillery, on trucks, in overloaded wagons travelling down ruined railway lines, on foot. We passed through devastated Dresden, then Prague, Budapest and Belgrade. We arrived in Prizren in the second half of June in a truck carrying flour from Urosevac. When we got off near Bistrica we were completely white with flour. Like ghosts from another world. No one recognised us.




Everyone was surprised that the family of the town doctor had survived the war, but they welcomed us warmly and helped us out. We again were given a room by the Jakic family. We returned to life. We remained in Prizren for three years. There, in what they called the Partisan Secondary School, I tried to bridge my lost war years. Three years of secondary school in a year. At the beginning of 1948, my mother and I moved to Belgrade.

Verlorener Zug, Tröbitz, Mühlberg

Eines Tages im April wurde uns gesagt, dass alle, die sich noch bewegen können, sich auf den Transport vorbereiten sollten. Der Grund für diese deutsche Entscheidung, wenige Tage vor der Befreiung, bleibt unklar. Himmler oder jemand anderes hatte in den letzten Tagen des Dritten Reiches Pläne mit uns.
Und so wurden Anfang April 1945 drei Konvois aus unserem Sternlager evakuiert. Hauptsächlich in Richtung Südosten. Der erste Konvoi erreichte Theresienstadt, der zweite wurde von den Amerikanern in Magedeburg befreit. Wir waren im dritten Konvoi. Am 10. April, fünf Tage vor der Befreiung des Lagers, wurde uns befohlen, zu einer Rampe zu gehen, etwa zehn Kilometer vom Lager entfernt.

Ende März hatte meine Mutter Fleckfieber bekommen! Sie konnte nur unter großen Schwierigkeiten gehen. Ich trug sie auf dem Rücken zum Zug, damit wir uns nicht trennen mussten. Mein Vater, der damals 54 Jahre alt war, sah aus, als ob er hundert Jahre alt wäre, aber er schleppte sich irgendwie neben uns her. Die Tatsache, dass Vater und ich (wenn auch nur wenige Tage) das Grauen des Lagers überlebten,, haben wir vor allem unserer Mutter zu verdanken. Sie war unser Anker. Sie kümmerte sich um uns und andere und versuchte zusätzliches Essen zu finden. Sie hat uns aus abgetragenen Decken Hosen und Hemden gemacht. Und vor allem hat sie durch große Anstrengung und unter erschreckenden Bedingungen die Ehre und Einheit unserer Familie bewahrt, als alles im Lager auseinanderfiel.

Sie beluden etwa 2400 von uns, aus Bergen-Belsen, Juden aus Holland und Jugoslawien, einige aus Griechenland und Frankreich, in sechzig Waggons, und unter SS-Geleit machten sich die Transporte in der Nacht des 10. April auf Todesreise durch ein zerstörtes Deutschland, das bereits in Flammen stand. Dieser Zug wurde später als "verlorener Zug" bekannt. Zuerst reisten wir über Lüneburg nach Norden in Richtung Hamburg. Dann wandte sich dieser Zug, etwa sechshundert Meter lang! südöstlich in Richtung Berlin. Dann wieder nach Süden, zu den Städten Cottbus und Lübben, dann nach Westen, nicht weit von der Elbe und dem Treffpunkt der sowjetischen und amerikanischen Truppen. Diese Irrfahrt durch Deutschland in geschlossenen Wagen ohne Nahrung und Wasser dauerte etwa zwei Wochen lang. Durch den Stacheldraht über den Wagenfenstern sahen wir Rauch und hörten Explosionen in der Ferne. Berlin stand unter dem Angriff der Roten Armee in Flammen. In den seltenen Fällen, in denen sie uns erlaubten, nach Wasser zu suchen, konnten wir die Toten neben den Eisenbahnlinien werfen und versuchen, sie in flachen Gräbern zu begraben. Während dieser Albtraumfahrt bekam ich Fleckfieber und durchlebte all das im Fieberdelirium. Meine Erinnerungen daran sind alle etwas verschwommen.

In der Nacht des 23. April hielt unser Zug auf der Bahnstrecke im Freien. Als der Frühlingsmorgen dämmerte, waren keine deutschen Wachen mehr um den Zug. Es war eine seltsame Stille draußen. Und in den Wagen der schwere Geruch von Kot, Urin und Tod. Jemand schaffte es, unsere Wagen zu öffnen. Wir sind gekrochen. Wegen meiner Krankheit konnte ich nicht mehr laufen und kroch auf meinem Bauch herum. Ein paar Stunden später schrie jemand "Russen! Russen!" In der Ferne, wie in einem Traum oder in dem berührenden Pathos eines russischen Films, sahen wir eine Gruppe Kavallerie herannahen. Dies war das Vormarschkontingent der Roten Armee. Wir waren frei! Diejenigen, die in der Lage waren, schrien aus vollem Herzen und küssten die Kavalleriemänner und ihre Pferde.

Einige Monate später, bevor sie in ihre Heimat zurückgeschickt wurden, sandten die überlebenden Häftlinge von Bergen-Belsen Stalin einen Dankesbrief, typisch für diese enthusiastischen Tage. "Jeder von uns wird unseren Kindern und Enkeln von Generation zu Generation mit tiefer Dankbarkeit von diesen glücklichen Tagen der Befreiung durch die siegreiche Rote Armee erzählen. Nach beispiellosem Leid kehren wir als freie Menschen zurück ins Leben."

Wir wurden in der Nähe eines Ortes namens Tröbitz im Osten Deutschlands befreit. Da die Kämpfe noch andauerten, hatten die sowjetischen Soldaten keine Zeit, sich um uns zu kümmern. Sie nahmen unseren ganzen Zug nach Tröbitz, vertrieben die deutschen Einheimischen aus ihren Häusern und hießen uns einziehen,um auf die sowjetischen Ärzteteams zu warten. Unsere Befreier setzten dann ihren Vormarsch fort. Weil wir so erschöpft waren, konnten wir uns nicht einmal über unsere Freiheit freuen. Aber viele von uns, in unserem Hunger, warfen sich auf das Essen, das wir in den Häusern fanden. Für einige erwies sich dies als fatal. Einige dieser befreiten Lagerinsassen starben unmittelbar nach ihrer Befreiung.

Die medizinischen Teams kamen ein oder zwei Tage später an. Aus Furcht, dass eine Typhusepidemie ausbrechen könnte, wurden alle Typhuspatienten in Feldlazarette im Umland gebracht, in eine Art Quarantäne. Und so fanden wir, mein Vater, meine Mutter und ich uns in der Nähe des Dorfes Mühlberg in einem Armeegefangenenlager wieder, das man in ein Feldlazarett umgewandelt hatte. Unsere Betten waren direkt nebeneinander.

Am Morgen des 29. April, sechs Tage nach unserer Befreiung, wachte ich auf. Mein Vater lag neben mir, er bewegte sich nicht. Er war im Schlaf gestorben. Ich reagierte fast hysterisch und rief: "Es gibt keinen Gott!" Wir haben meinen Vater am selben Tag auf einem nahe gelegenen Kriegsgefangenen-friedhof in einem Waldstück begraben.
Zwei deutsche Gefangene, begleitet von einer berittenen sowjetischen Wache, gruben das Grab. Wir senkten den Sarg mit dem Körper meines Vaters hinein. Die beiden deutschen Gefangenen murmelten etwas. Ich dachte, sie hätten so etwas wie "Der verfluchte Jude" gesagt. Ich bin mir bis heute nicht sicher, ob ich das wirklich gehört oder ob ich es mir nur eingebildet habe. Ich ging zu der Wache mit dem Pferd beschwerte mich, dass die Deutschen über meinen toten Vater fluchten. Die Wache gab mir die Peitsche, die er in den Händen hielt. "Schlage sie", sagte er zu mir. Ich habe es versucht, aber hatte nicht die Kraft dazu. Dann nahm er die Peitsche zurück und fing an, die Deutschen den Weg hinunter zu treiben, sie zu peitschen.

Mit einem Bleistift schrieb ich den Namen meines Vaters auf ein Brett und legte es auf das frische Grab.
Viele Jahre später, irgendwann in der zweiten Hälfte der 1980er Jahre, war ich in Ost-Berlin als ein israelischer Vertreter, der an einem internationalen Kongress von Kämpfern gegen den Faschismus teilnahm. Ich bat die Organisatoren, mir bei der Suche nach dem Grab meines Vaters in Ostdeutschland zu helfen, wo wir befreit wurden. Meine Suche nach dem Grab dauerte mehrere Tage. Und so sind wir auch im Dorf Mühlberg angekommen.
Einer der älteren Menschen erinnerte sich, dass es in der Gegend ein Lager für Kriegsgefangene gab und dass dort unmittelbar nach dem Krieg kranke KZ-Internierte untergebracht waren. Er erinnerte sich sogar, dass es einen Friedhof für Kriegsgefangene gab. Wir gingen, um die Stelle zu finden, wo das Lager stand. Geblieben waren nur die Betonfundamente der Baracken, die jetzt mit hohen Pflanzen bewachsen waren. Wir fanden auch den Ort, wo der Häftlingsfriedhof gewesen sein sollte, der Ort, an dem ich meinen Vater begraben hatte. Aber es war kein Friedhof mehr da, noch das Grab meines Vaters.
Sie erklärten mir, dass es im Jahr 1947 einHochwasser in der Gegend gegeben hatte, das die flachen Gräber ausgewaschen hatte und dass die Knochen der Toten durch das Wasser verstreut worden waren. Die Überreste wurden gesammelt und in einem gemeinsamen Grab auf dem Dorffriedhof mit einem kleinen Grabstein mit der Aufschrift "Dreitausend Soldaten und Offiziere verschiedener Nationen, die gegen den Faschismus kämpften und für Frieden und Freiheit starben" begraben.
Kein Wort über jüdische Opfer! Mein Vater und die anderen Opfer des "verlorenen Zuges", die hier begraben wurden, waren weder Soldaten noch Offiziere. Sie waren nur gewöhnliche Juden. In diesem Nachkriegschaos wußte man vielleicht nicht einmal, dass sie existierten. Und so habe ich das Grab meines Vaters in Deutschland nicht gefunden. Im Holocaust gab es keine Gräber.
Viele Jahre später, als ich die Listen im Yad Vashem Gedenkzentrum in Jerusalem durchging, erfuhr ich, dass meine Seriennummer in Bergen-Belsen 4657 war und dass die Zahlen meiner Eltern vor meinen waren, die meiner Mutter 4656 und meines Vaters 4655.

Am 50. Jahrestag der Befreiung, im April 1995, versammelte sich eine Gruppe von etwa zweihundert Menschen, die den "verlorenen Zug" überlebt hatten, in Bergen-Belsen, aus Israel, Holland, den USA und einigen Dutzend jugoslawischen Überlebenden. Nach den bewegenden Begegnungen und der Gedenkfeier fuhren wir wieder die Strecke des "verlorenen Zuges", diesmal aber in Bussen.
Und so kamen wir fünfzig Jahre später wieder in Tröbitz an. Auf dem örtlichen Friedhof, auf dem einige der Häftlinge nach der Befreiung beigesetzt wurden, errichteten wir in einer rührenden Zeremonie eine Gedenktafel in deutscher und hebräischer Sprache mit den Namen der 320 Opfer des "verlorenen Zuges". Unter ihnen war der Name meines Vaters, Dr. Yosef Teitelbaum.

Einige Wochen nach dem Tod meines Vaters beschlossen meine Mutter und ich, nicht zu warten, bis die Rückführung organisiert war, sondern allein nach Prizren zurückzukehren. Zu uns gesellte sich Bela Abramovic aus Pristina. Und so machten wir uns auf eine Reise durch Europa, die etwa einen Monat dauerte. Statt des gelben Davidsterns hat nun meine Mutter unsere jugoslawische Trikolore mit dem fünfzackigen Stern in der Mitte aufgenäht. Das war der Brauch unter den vielen in Deutschland befreiten Häftlingen und Lagerinternierten, die alle ihre eigene Flagge trugen. Damals öffneten Jugoslawien und Tito für uns alle Türen, besser als jedes gültige Visum. Auf russischer schwerer Artillerie, auf Lastwagen, in überladenen Waggons, die über ruinierte Eisenbahnlinien fuhren, zu Fuß. Wir durchquerten das zerstörte Dresden, dann Prag, Budapest und Belgrad. Wir kamen in Prizren in der zweiten Junihälfte in einem Lastwagen an, der Mehl von Urosevac beförderte. Als wir in der Nähe von Bistrica ausstiegen, waren wir völlig weiß mit Mehl. Wie Geister aus einer anderen Welt. Niemand hat uns erkannt.
Alle waren überrascht, dass die Familie des Stadtarztes den Krieg überlebt hatte, aber sie begrüßten uns herzlich und halfen uns. Wir bekamen wieder ein Zimmer von der Familie Jakic. Wir sind ins Leben zurückgekehrt. Wir blieben drei Jahre in Prizren. Dort, in der sogenannten Partisanenschule, versuchte ich, meine verlorenen Kriegsjahre zu überbrücken. Drei Jahre Sekundarschule in einem Jahr. Anfang 1948 zogen meine Mutter und ich nach Belgrad.