Thomas Frankl

Today we had the opportunity to listen to a Holocaust survivor tell the story about his early childhood and his father. This was a very interesting experience for me because I have only heard WWII survivors talk and never a Holocaust survivor, and reading Ruth Kluger and Ellie Weisel and other books on surviving the Holocaust don’t do as much as something like this or going to a concentration camp. The man was Thomas Frankl who was very young when the Holocaust happened but does have some memories of it. Fortunately for him, his father was lucky enough to have a business that was necessary in the minds of the Nazis so he was not treated like every other Jew or Polish person or homosexual. He was given a smaller star to wear which meant that he was somewhat protected, and from what Thomas said, it seemed like this was just a matter of luck and that this did not happen that much. He does recount the story when he was at home and he heard the footsteps walking up the stairs and the butt end of a gun banging against the door. Then the Nazi Gestapo came in and lied to them that they were just going to need them for a little. Thomas’ father was taken away and sent to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and given the tattoo number B 14395. This deportation occurred at the end of September in 1944, the day after the Nazis came to there house and arrested them. It was hard to watch him talk about this because he was crying through it. And when he got to his father being liberated by the Red Army, he needed a tissue, and although it was happy, I could tell that it was still hard for him to talk about. He then passed around a book of his father’s paintings and told us that the only way for his father to express himself was through paintings and it wasn’t until later in his life that he was able to talk about it and express his emotions in his words, which just makes it that much harder for Thomas to talk about it to us. All in all this was a really great experience because for me it is hard to understand the Holocaust well just from written sources, but seeing a full grown man stand in front a vividly describe everything he saw as a little boy and the emotion on his face really hits me hard. As time goes on though, more and more Holocaust survivors are going be passing away, so we were very fortunate for this opportunity and I thank Kathy for setting this up and Thomas sharing this part of his life with us. He also said that he would be able to show some of us his father’s gallery in the Judenplatz, so I hope to be making it out there to see his father’s artwork in person and not just on paper.