A father sent to Auschwitz, a son imprisoned at Buchenwald and a daughter forced into slave labour – the family who survived the Nazis against all odds

One day in 1935, Erna Bernstein, a mother of two, was making meatballs in her apartment in central Berlin when there was a knock on the door. Two Gestapo officers entered and told her that it would be better if she divorced her husband. ‘If you do this, your children’s lives will be significantly better.’

Erna had no intention of complying. Her husband Sigi was Jewish by birth. When he married Erna, who was born a Christian, her family broke off relations with him. Neither of them had gone to synagogue or church. They were just a working-class couple from Berlin raising their children Heini and Edie.

However, twisting their virulent anti-Semitism, the Nazis had decided that children of mixed heritage would be branded as ‘Mischlinge’ (a derogatory term for dog meaning ‘mulatto’) and treated as Jews.

Heini and Edie had never set foot in a synagogue, but they were still scum in the eyes of the regime. Racial laws increased month by month, making life more and more unbearable for Jews and ‘Mischlinge’.

This deeply disturbing story of what happened to Heini and Edie over the next decade is told by Edie’s daughter, Sharon Ring. Towards the end of Edie’s life, in a Norfolk bungalow, she pointed to a black box and said to Sharon: ‘These are Uncle Heini’s memories. I’ve never read it because I know it would be painful. I know because I was there too.”

For decades, Edie, like Heini, had avoided talking about her wartime experiences. Instead of looking back, they wanted to look forward; they wanted to embrace life rather than revisit trauma.

But now, at last, Edie told Sharon her story: how she had been forced to leave school at 12 by her teachers ‘because we didn’t want her to mix with the Aryan race’; how he contracted rickets from malnutrition and being confined to his home for fear of violence on the streets; how he was forced into slave labor at the age of 16, working 12 hours a day digging up bomb sites in Berlin filled with human body parts; and that when the Russians came in 1945, she narrowly escaped being raped by a Russian soldier who raped the woman next to him.

Till death do us part: Erna did not leave her husband Sigi after the Gestapo threatened the family because of their Jewish heritage

What happened to Heini was also horrifying. A handsome, fun-loving, resourceful young man, he at first refused to comply with racial laws. He was earning money as a plumber, disobeyed the Jewish curfew, and visited his non-Jewish girlfriend, Margot.

Then one night in 1943 he was taken away by the Gestapo, interrogated and forced to go to a ‘training camp’ and work 12-hour shifts building a railway in -10C.

Fortunately, there was a humane guard, Sergeant Franke, at home, who let him write postcards, and his mother visited him, bringing him socks, a sweater, and boots. He found some coupons on the ground and Franke allowed him to go to the village and exchange them for cigarettes and food.

One day a Russian escaped from the camp and Heini was sent to chase him and he decided to escape. But there was no way he could survive at home without a ration card, so he returned to the camp.

Persecuted: Heini and Edie were identified as ‘mixed’, a term used for those of mixed Jewish heritage, and were punished by the Nazis.

He knew he would be punished, and so he was: reduced to the dog corpse of the sadistic SS; The SS whistled orders at him; One of the orders was to count 25 lashes given to another prisoner who was tied to the flagpole.

It got worse. He was put on a cattle truck and taken to Buchenwald, where he was greeted with the warning sight of a prisoner hanging on the gallows. Although he was not an electrician here, he got a job as an electrician. A Czech prisoner named Frantisek, an electrician, offered to work with him and was allowed to do so. Prisoners slept on bare wire beds, the wires digging into their weak bodies.

Heini was sentenced to 25 lashes after a pair of pliers went missing (he had lent them to some Russian fugitives but never admitted). Sleeping on that wire bed with his back bleeding was even more painful.

The ‘thousand-year Reich’ ended after just 12 years. On April 1, 1945, as Heini set out on a forced march from Buchenwald, harnessed to trailers carrying SS belongings, there was profound relief when the SS suddenly disappeared. The prisoners were free. They helped themselves with a feast of sausages and tobacco from the trailers.

When the camp was liberated, Sigi was so weak that it took him months to be ready for the 350-mile journey from Auschwitz to Berlin.

By some miracle, the whole family survived. Sigi worked as a forced laborer at Auschwitz. When the camp was liberated he was so weak that it took him months to be ready for the 350-mile journey to Berlin. The flat had been destroyed in an Allied air raid and his wife now lived in a flat previously owned by the Nazis.

Edie’s story has a fairy tale ending. Having never left Berlin in his life, he went to the countryside in the summer of 1945 to stay with the family of Heini’s new girlfriend, Ruth.

On a rural street she met a nice British soldier named Jimmy Ring. They made friends. Five days later Jimmy said, ‘I’m going to marry you.’ And so it appeared.

They moved to London, got married, had a baby (Sharon) and years later, with the help of Edie’s war deprivation compensation from Germany, they bought a three-bed semi in Enfield.

Heini, Sigi and Erna tried to move to Palestine, but they missed Germany and returned separately.

A new horror awaited them: the sudden appearance of the Berlin Wall on the night of August 13, 1961. Heini was stuck on the east side and his family was stuck in the west.

This book is an important contribution to history, viewed from the perspective of two children with two Jewish grandparents.

Edie said to Sharon: ‘That man [Hitler] It did not dominate my life. I made this happy, I gave you a happy life too, my daughter. “This was my victory.”