A beaming smile on his face, the boy is clearly thrilled with the model plane he is sitting on – a wonderful birthday gift. But look closer and there on the tail fin is the sinister swastika symbol. This snapshot is of Hanns Jurgen Hoss, son of Rudolf Hoss, the hated commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp , growing up just metres from the site of more than a million deaths.
“One of the prisoners built it with his troop for my birthday,” Hanns says of the plane as he returns to walk around the back garden of the house he lived in from the age of three. What is hard to reconcile is the now 87-year-old looking at the picture of what he calls “my bomber” and the reality of life for the men who were –most likely – forced to build it. “My family moved to Auschwitz when I was three years old,” Hanns recalls.
“We lived in the immediate vicinity of his workplace. As children, we thought this was a prison and he was the boss.” The reality, as we all know, was horrifically different.
More than 1.3 million people of 20 nationalities were sent to Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews. At least 1.
1 million were murdered there. Today, the high walls and barbed wire still stand between Hanns’ childhood home and the camp. But as high as those walls are, the mental barrier for him seems to be even more impenetrable.
“I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz,” he recalls. Family photographs show happy children playing in the pool in the back garden, Hanns d.