In August of 1944 the Lodz ghetto of Poland was liquidated. That meant all the Jews were sent to Auschwitz. But the Germans kept my father and the people in his factory together. The officer in charge told my father his group was ultimately going to be sent to a Siemens factory in Germany. Apparently my father had created such an efficient team that the Germans wanted to keep them intact.
When they arrived at Auschwitz my father's group was not processed like most prisoners meaning; children and any one frail right to gas chambers, the others shaved, tattooed. etc. They kept my father's group sitting on grassy hill. The other prisoners who worked for the Germans were stunned. They had never seen something like this before.
A German officer finally came with soldiers who carried a bunch of stuff. The German officer would hold up an item and ask if my father's group could make such a thing. Eventually the men and women were separated into their individual camps, however for the next 5 days they all remained unassigned in Auschwitz.
At one point my father was standing next to the barbed wire and saw my mother across the way in the women's camp. The distance between them was the width of a typical residential street including the side walks. There was a high fence of barbed wire on each side. At this point they still had some paper and they would write notes to each other, wrap the note in a rock and throw it across. My mother didn't have much of an arm, and her notes would land in no man's land. My father's notes did reach my mother.
Each day they would meet at a certain time at the barbed wire. But then one day as my father thew a note he was caught by a German guard. "What are you doing?" he barked. My father explained in German he was thowing a note to his wife. My father thought he was dead for sure. But the guard merely said, "Away from the wire" and moved on.
The next day the Siemen's transfer was cancelled and they were processed into Auschwitz. That was the last time my mother and father would see each other, until a year and half later, after the war was long over.
My mother said she never forgot the last note. She translated it as saying, "My sweet, don't worry, we will be together again and I will kiss you and hold you in my arms."
My father being the dedicated worker and leader that he naturally was rose quickly to run a telephone repair factory in the ghetto. As mentioned in an earlier post (The Radio) he understood electricity and had a knack for fixing things. The German officer in charge of the whole ghetto, hearing about his ability to fix things brought my father to his office. The officer had a record player, a very advanced design for the time, that wasn't working correctly and asked if my father could fix it. Felix said of course (even though he had never seen the inside of one before) and said he needed to take it back to his workshop with a few records for a couple of days.
My father, Guido Felix Brinkmann, was a German from Latvia who ended up in Poland on a program that moved German people into occupied territories. When it was time to join the military he innocently and honestly wrote on his application that his mother was Jewish but converted to Lutheran before he was born. That brought the proverbial "knock on the door" by the Gestapo and he was thrown into the Lodz Ghetto.
My father Felix understood electricity at an early age. That's because his father Richard was an electrical engineer. At one point Richard left home for six months to help South Africa establish electric light. That is the level at which he played. So the Brinkmann boys grew up around it. Felix also had a natural knack at fixing things.
"I feel I had a fortunate life. Even going through the three concentration camps, I somehow was able to make the best out of the worst. I never would have thought growing up as a boy in Riga, Latvia that I would end up in the greatest city (NYC), in the greatest country in the world (USA)."
These are the words my father spoke to me two weeks ago, July 14th, when I last visited him in NY. My dad survived three concentration camps for 12 months, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Ebensee. He came to NY in 1947 with $5 in his pocket and unable to speak English. Eventually in 1971 he partnered with Mel Steir and Joe Cavalaro to open what would become one of the premier discotheques in NYC, the Adams Apple, (1st Ave and E 61st St.)
When he was in the Lodz ghetto (before being shipped out to the camps) he was in charge of a telephone repair factory. A German officer hearing about his ability to fix things brought him a record player and asked if my father could make it work. Felix said of course (even though he had never seen the inside of one before). He asked the German officer to leave it and a few records for a couple of days. Felix “the electrician” fixed it in a matter of minutes and as a treat to his “employees” he brought all the workers at the factory together to hear the music. People didn't have such things in the ghetto and hadn't heard music for years. Most of the employees were young women and some of them insisted, "Herr Brinkmann you must dance." My father chose my mother. A day later he made her his secretary, even though she couldn’t type, but as my dad said, “She sure could kiss.” And the rest is history.
