Bert Strauss
Bert Strauss grew up in the small German town of Gemünden. When he was eight years old, Hitler came to power. Bert’s hometown became Nazified very quickly. Stones smashed his bedroom window and random fists smacked him on the street almost daily. As a Jew, he was now forbidden from walking on the sidewalk.
By 1941, life was miserably bleak for the Strauss family, but they took a strange comfort in the thought that it couldn’t get any worse. Until one night in November when it did.
The Food Left Behind
Evicted from Gemünden, the Strauss were forced on a five-day journey in a crowded cattle car. Arriving in a cold and strange city, they were marched to their new living quarters in a section of town fenced by barbed wire. To their great surprise, they found bread, butter and ham on the kitchen table. The pantry was stocked with potatoes. Although they hadn’t eaten in days, they were terrified to touch the food, thinking it must be poisoned.
The next day, they met neighbors who had been brought in a few days earlier and learned they were now in the Riga Ghetto. Worse, they discovered that thousands of Latvian Jews had been massacred just a few days before. The food they found wasn’t poisoned; it was left by the people shot in the woods in Rumbula.
Despite his youth, Bert was forced to work at a body shop, repairing cars for the SS. Later, he would do the same thing for Kommandant Sauer at the Kaiserwald concentration camp in the Riga suburbs.
Bert regularly smuggled food to his family in the ghetto, risking hanging if he were caught.
In an all-too-familiar story, Bert’s father was sent to the hard labor camp of Salaspils. His mother later died in the ghetto.
BARELY IN HIS TEENS, BERT WAS SENT TO STUTTHOF EXTERMINATION CAMP. Overcrowded, underfed, and nauseous from THE INESCAPABLE STENCH OF FLESH BURNING IN THE CREMATORIUMS, Bert slept in a bed with six other men. One night in his final month of captivity, he grew very cold. He feared he might have come down with typhoid. Again. Teetering on the edge of the bed, he urged the man beside him to move a bit. He didn’t. He tried to talk to him but got no response. With a shudder, he realized
the man was dead, frozen beside him.
BERT HAD WITHERED TO 70 LBS. WHEN HE WAS LIBERATED BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN MAY OF 1945. THE BRITS BROUGHT HIM TO A HOSPITAL AND AFTER A FEW DAYS, BERT WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO GO FOR A WALK ON HIS OWN. HE INSTINCTIVELY WALKED OUT ON THE STREET. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Bert, you’re a free man now. You can walk on the sidewalk.”
Beginning Again
Bert moved to the United States in 1947 and settled in California where he married and had two kids. In 1991, MTV turned his story into a documentary.
