Beste Freunde für immer

March 23, 2021 10:02 PM

Every Sunday, Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg have a scheduled phone call. The weekly calls are only a recent ritual. In fact, just four months ago, both women believed the other had died in the Holocaust. “For 82 years, I thought my best friend from Germany was dead,” Grebenschikoff said. “I’d been looking for her for all those years, and I never found her.” The women first met when they were 6. They attended school and synagogue together. The last time the two women saw each other was in the spring of 1939, when they were 9. (SLWaPo)
posted by ShooBoo (10 comments total)

beautiful. thanks for posting this.
posted by mollymillions at 10:57 PM on March 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m crying. What a horrible and wonderful story.
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 11:08 PM on March 23, 2021

Sweet story - and love the title. Thank you.
posted by anshuman at 11:29 PM on March 23, 2021

Thank you!
posted by meinvt at 9:46 AM on March 24, 2021

Ich weine nicht, du weinst
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:18 AM on March 24, 2021

Should not have read in such a dusty room.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:26 AM on March 24, 2021

....30,000 men were arrested just for being Jewish, including Wahrenberg’s father. He spent a month in Germany’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp before he managed to escape.

He may have been released. According to KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
by Nikolaus Wachsmann, most of the Jews arrested and thrown in concentration camps that night were set free after a few weeks.. The idea of selling all their property at a huge loss and turning over all their money to Eichmann's SS Emigration Office for exit visas then had a lot of appeal to them.

He may have escaped too, of course, but I wonder if the article's author just assumed that.
posted by thelonius at 12:09 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Equally excellent and tragic. Some day soon all of these people will be gone, there will not be living memory of these atrocities.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:27 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

He may have been released.

I think we need to read “escape” in the sense of “avoided a possible fate”. As you note, many German Jews imprisoned in the early years were later released. The rule of law was still a thing, and death camps were not yet a potential destination for people the regime wanted to eliminate. Consequently, everything was being done to immiserate Jews' lives, but at that point the official plan was to get them to emigrate. From that perspective, imprisoning them was counterproductive.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:36 PM on March 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

The rule of law was still a thing

Indeed, in the early 30's, some courageous prosecutors brought murder charges against SS or SA camp guards.
Wachsmann's book was tough going, but I learned a lot.
posted by thelonius at 12:13 AM on March 25, 2021