A Friend Lost

My father had a first cousin named Werner. Werner and he were the best of friends. Werner’s father was married to my grandfather’s sister and they were in business together. When the families fled to Sweden, Werner’s family came also.  My father said they were inseparable. Then, one day, Werner…disappeared. From Stockholm. His whole family was just…gone. My father later said that the adults must surely have known what happened but that the children were not told. My father was left with yet another loss, which was unexplained. Of course sometime during his adulthood my father did discover what happened. My father never saw him again.

Many many years later, in 2007, I was fortunate to be contacted by Werner’s sons, who contacted me through a family tree website. Before he died, my father was able to contact Werner’s sons by email, and the circle was finally closed. It was only then that my father shared his memories with me. Here are my father’s words sent to me in an email:

(Werner’s son’s) grandfather, the husband of (my father’s sister) owned together with my father a Leather import and export business in Hamburg.  My father had earlier, before he was married, worked for his Onkel in Stockholm for a couple of years in the early 20s. Thus, when my parents and the (name redacted) decided to leave Germany in 1933, after Hitler's rise to power there, (his uncle) offered my father and Werner’s father a job in his company.  We and (name redacted) left for Sweden in early 1933. My mother with my sister and me in April and my aunt together with Werner and his siblings, a bit later, in the spring of 1933. My father and Werner’s father left for Stockholm a month or so later. They both worked for his uncle in 1933, but decided, not much later, to form their own Import Export business, AB. Nordhandel.

Werner’s family left Sweden for Rio de Janeiro, one day, unannounced, in 1938/39 and that is where his son gets the Kristallnacht from......  Because on November 9th 1938, after a Jewish Student had assassinated the German attaché in Paris, the first far reaching programme, which resulted in many burned synagogues and looted Jewish-owned stores, throughout Germany, which was then called the Kristallnacht after all the broken glass.  That is when Werner’s parents plus children wisely left Sweden for Rio de Janeiro.

Our deepest regret is that our fathers were not able to reunite in life. When my father passed in 2013, one of the family wrote to me:  Now the three friends Werner, Carl-Albert and Gunther are all gone. Hope they are now celebrating together like they did in their teens. They had such heavy backpacks to carry through life.

We hope so.

My father and Werner are in this picture together at the far left, with their arms around each other.