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The Herald
March 3, 1999  
775 words

Survivors of Nazi terror dogged by grim memories

By DORI STUBBS
Herald Olympia Bureau

On their journey from Nazi terror to American freedom, the two boys witnessed concentration camps, Russian soldiers killing Hitler Youth and the death of their mother.

 

Fred and Hank Taucher were the equivalent of first-graders when they witnessed their Jewish family's tailor shop smashed and ransacked on Nov. 9, 1938: Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass."

 

Windows shattered in the night, glass covering the streets like crystal. And like those shards, the memories today are as sharp and painful.

 

Hank, of Oak Harbor, says he'll let Fred, of Edmonds, do most of the talking, as he has tried to erase many of the memories of the Holocaust and World War II. But the details remain vivid in both men's minds.

 

After Kristallnacht, the Taucher family was placed in a one-room apartment in a complex for Jews.

 

Their father was forced to work on the German railroad. One evening in 1943, he never came home. He had been hauled off to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp, and killed within a month.

 

The Nazis had no use for tailors.

 

The boys and their mother were told of his capture by Gertrude Noetling, a friend the brothers refer to as their "guardian angel," a high-ranking Nazi official and friend to Hitler as well.

 

The same evening their father was taken, Gestapo agents invaded the Taucher's apartment unit.

 

"We grabbed things as quickly as we could," Hank Taucher recalls. "We locked the front door. As we went out the back door, the Nazis were coming into the building."

 

They escaped Berlin and hid from place to place in Germany for the next two years. Noetling, with her connections, found them homes and provided fake names. But they often went days without food or water.

 

"She was a true Nazi, but felt what was happening wasn't right," Hank Taucher says fondly of Noetling. "She went out of her way to help us at the cost of losing her own life."

 

By the end of the war, they had returned to Berlin and lived in Noetling's apartment.

 

While riding a trolley one day, the brothers were checked by the Gestapo for identification papers.

 

They had none.

 

They were taken and strip-searched, and instantly recognized as Jews. They were questioned in a

room used as a torture chamber.

 

In order not to give anyone away, "We said, 'I don't know, I don't know. We sleep on the street and steal food,' " Fred Taucher says.

 

They were loaded into a "cattle car" with other Jews and Russian soldiers and shipped to Dachau, another Nazi death camp.

 

"They never opened the door," Fred continues. "We were inside Dachau camp, but they kept the rail car closed. We stayed for two days. No food. No water. No sanitation."

 

Because the Allies were already gaining momentum, the camp was under attack. During an air raid, the door popped open.

 

The boys followed the Russian soldiers out of Dachau and to a Hitler Youth Camp, where boys as young as 10 and 11 trained for Nazi military service. The Russians overcame the guards and shot them -- along with the boys training there.

 

The brothers found two dead boys their height, and dressed themselves in Hitler Youth uniforms. They made their way to a highway and flagged down two Nazi SS soldiers --an elite group of Nazi military.

 

"We said, 'Hey, somebody just killed everybody. We're the only ones to survive,' " Fred Taucher says. " 'Our mother is in Berlin. We have a message for Hitler.' "

 

The troopers seated the boys in the back of their convertible and sped through all the checkpoints.

 

When they reunited with their mother, the three were forced to find shelter under a train station because of Allied fire. It wasn't long before Berlin was liberated, but the boys were devastated.

 

Fred Taucher found his mother dead in the street when he came up looking for her after she'd gone to get food. To this day they don't know how she was killed.

 

"That's how the war ended for us," Hank Taucher says.
 

After the war, a Jewish organization helped the brothers make their way to the United States in 1946. In their early teens, they weighed about 60 pounds each.

 

But the horror they suffered under the Nazi regime is only slightly diminished by the joy they express about arriving in America and finding success. Hank Taucher served in the U.S. Army in Korea and Vietnam. Fred Taucher owns a computer company.

 

"When we came into New York, when we saw the Statue of Liberty, what a beautiful sight," Fred Taucher says. "I still remember that day."

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