Translated…
The year that Rainer Hoess arrived at Auschwitz for the first time was when he was forty-eight, he was divorced, had alcoholism tendencies, had a fall out with his family. At age forty-eight, he’d lived a year longer than his own grandfather, his grandfather, when he was forty-seven, after he was tried in Poland, was sent to be executed in Auschwitz. Rainer had a grandmother, his father and an older uncle, three aunts, they’d all lived in Auschwitz, his youngest aunt was even, born in the concentration camps, but after the family got away in 1945, none of them had set foot into their hometowns again. Rainer’s grandmother, Rudolf Hoess, is the most powerful commander of Auschwitz, he was known, for his high-efficiency, a day, he’d “taken care of” 7,000 Jews on average, was held in high regards by his commander, Heinrich Himmler.
not my photograph…
Before age twelve, Rainer had no clue of his family history, didn’t know the significance of his own last name, he’d gone to a boarding school, and, the cook at the school just so happened, was a survivor from Auschwitz, he’d picked up his text and read about World War II, and, that, was all he learned about it, and, before Rainer appeared back in 20089, they’d already, disappeared, off of the public’s radar…
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Rainer Hoess, the third generation of the Hoess family, finally made it to Auschwitz, to take a tour, of the not-opened-to-the-public ancestral home of his. He’d recalled how his grandmother told him, that she’d used to pick the strawberries from the yard, and he’d needed to wash it very clean, and now he’d understood, that o the sweetened strawberries, there was often, a layer of ashes.
The ashes over the strawberries came from the skies, spit out by the chimneys of the incinerators, from the bodies in the gas chambers to the incinerator, from stripping barren, to entering into the gas chambers, from stripping naked and getting off the trains, from having NO drop of water in their bodies for eight days, seven nights, and chased onto the trains, from the Jews’ quarantine zones to the trains, from the kind neighbor’s hidden doors behind the bookcases, staying hidden, until they were found, and rounded up, to the quarantine areas……everything followed the orders, from the ashes, to the flesh and bones, to the heart beats and the breaths, to the end, a complete man.
not my photo still…
And so, this, is a man’s journey to find out about his family’s history, and in this case, his family was part of the Gestapo that killed off the Jews in the Holocaust, and this man is now, carrying the burdens of his own forefathers’ sins toward a race of people.
Life, the Obstacle Course 