By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Born after World War II, Mark James knew that he had a dead older brother for whom he was named, but he said he never asked his parents about him because he didn’t want to cause them emotional distress.
The older brother’s first name was Marek, and that actually was the younger brother’s name too before it was Anglicized from the original Polish.
Beginning in the 1980s, Mark James began to learn horrible things about what happened to his brother at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp near Hamburg, Germany.
He related his story on Thursday, May 5, to high school students at part of the San Diego Jewish Academy’s commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the annual day for Holocaust observances.
When Marek and parents Adam and Zela completed their cattle car journey from Radom, Poland, to the Auschwitz Death Camp, they were spared being sent to the gas chambers simply by random chance. The chambers already being too full, according to James’ research ,the father was sent to the men’s camp, soon to lose touch with his family, and the mother and son were sent to a barracks located the farthest distance from the gas chambers. According to James, the Nazis emptied the barracks closest to the chambers first, then worked their way back to the next set of barracks, and so on. This process meant it would be a long time before the James family faced another selection.
However, the infamous Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele subsequently received a request from Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, a fellow physician at the Neuengamme camp, for 10 boys and 10 girls upon whom he could run some experiments dealing with tuberculosis. Heissmeyer reportedly hoped the experiments would qualify him for a prestigious professorship.
James told the SDJA students that much of the information cited Gunther Schwarberg’s book The Murders at Bullenhiser Damm in relaying his brother’s story to the students. Facts from that book also were incorporated into a 1989 movie, The Rose Garden, starring Liv Ullmann and Maximilian Schell. James told the story as follows:
Heissmeyer injected live tuberculosis bacilli in the children’s lungs, testing his racist hypothesis that Jews are inferior beings, and therefore would soon die from the injections, whereas true Aryans would be able to resist the disease. Not only were the 20 children treated like guinea pigs, they each had at the foot of their beds a caged guinea pig which had been similarly injected, according to James.
After the children became sick, Heissmeyer removed the children’s lymph nodes, having all of them photographed with their arms held up over their heads so that viewers could see the incisions.
On April 20, 1945, a few weeks before Germany surrendered, the Nazis wanted to cover up their brutal experiments. Nazi Lt. Arnold Strippel arranged for the children to be taken to the Bullenhiser Damm, a school inn Hamburg, where they first were injected with morphine and then taken to a basement room where nooses had been attached to hooks. The lightest of the children was lifted up to a noose, which was put around the child’s neck, and then the Nazi executioner yanked the children down hard toward the floor, causing the child to strangle. The other children similarly were hanged. Marek was just six years old at the time.
Strippel was tried as a war criminal, but not for the murders of the 20 children. Instead he was convicted and sentenced to 21 life terms for the earlier shooting of 21 inmates at Buchenwald who were murdered in retaliation for an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler.
Strippel was retried in 1969, and his sentence was reduced to just six years. As he already had spent 20 years in prison, the Germans decided he should be compensated for the additional prison time he had served. The government conferred upon this murderer 120,000 German marks.
Although there were efforts to try Strippel for the children’s murder, he died in 1994 before he could again be brought to justice.
Dr. Heissmeyer lived and practiced medicine for 20 years in Communist East Germany before he was tried in 1966 for the murders. He died in prison just a year later.
James said that as these facts came to light he never told his parents, Adam and Zela, assuming the information was just too horrible for them to know. Separated during the war, his parents had been reunited at a displaced persons camp. James was the only child they had.
Fast forward to 2011 and 2015 when James and his wife Sandra attended official commemorations in Hamburg for the 20 children as well as for their caretakers and some Soviet prisoners who also had been executed at Bullenhiser Damm. There, James met family members from Israel whom he had never met before. City officials attended the events, at which current school children read stories that they had written about each of the children, including Marek. There is a museum in the room where the executions took place. Mark James also learned that each of the children, including his brother, had a street named for him in Hamburg.
Never having met his brother, nor heard his parents talk about him, James did not exhibit any outward signs of emotion during his power point presentation about Marek’s torture and death. To the contrary, he sounded much like an historian discussing someone who was interesting but of no personal connection.
His wife, Sandra, commented that James has been a computer engineer all his adult life and prefers to deal with systems and not emotions. In that James has made similar presentations about his brother on numerous occasions, I could not help but wonder if James has insulated his emotions, even as he once shielded those of his parents.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)