Brigitte Höss, who died in October 2023, was the last person to remember what life was like in the villa at Auschwitz.Brigitte Höss, who died in October 2023, was the last person to remember what life was like in the villa at Auschwitz.Her father was Rudolf Höss, the camp’s commandant.
We were sitting in Brigitte’s curtains-drawn house in the suburbs of Washington DC. The neighbourhood was full of senators, lobbyists and lawyers. The streets were wide and lined with trees that had long lost their leaves. In April 1945, just before the Soviet army took Berlin, her father had gone on the run. He took on the identity of a seaman and worked at a farm near Flensburg in northern Germany. Brigitte, her mother and siblings hid in a nearby sugar factory.
So it was that eight years later, in December 2021, I was once again sitting in Brigitte’s living room in the gloomy and cluttered house outside Washington DC. “What was your first memory?” I started by asking. “Auschwitz,” she said. “I don’t remember anything before that.” Her mother and father were very close, Brigitte told me. “They loved each other.” At the weekends, her father didn’t have to go to what she called “work”. He could spend time with his family.
Before he was hanged in Auschwitz, in April 1947, Rudolf Höss wrote his final words to Brigitte and her sister Heidetraud. I read this to Brigitte:
Source: Loan Digest (loandigest.net)
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