Alfred Caro

Jason Florez
Comp-102 10/11/11
Larry Neuburger
Alfred Caro
Alfred Caro was born in Sumter, Berlin. He lived a relatively good life up until the early 1930’s. One day he came home and his mother told him that the German police had come there asking questions mainly pertaining to the number of males that were in their family and that one of the males needed to go with the police as part of a political investigation. This obviously frightened Alfred so he hid for a few days with his aunt and another couple days with a close friend. After those few days of hiding he came back home to his family and told his mother and father that he would be the one to go with the German police. This showed great courage and leadership of his family. First they took him to a regular building in Berlin and simply asked him several personal questions. Then after a couple hours they took him and hundreds of other Jewish people to a facility surrounded by fences. He mentioned how he could tell there was no sign of good in the face of the Nazis. Hatred and evil was all he could sense from them. While he was in the “camp” people were being beaten, hit and kicked all around him, but nobody fought back. They were given minimal nutrition such as watery soup and sometimes stale bread. At night they all slept on the floor. He spent approximately 6 weeks in this place. He kept his head down and obeyed orders, never speaking out of line. And then one day, just like that they let him go and told him he was free. He explained how extremely lucky he was to be one of the few to be released. Soon after he returned home he was given a chance to leave Berlin and go to Belgium by train, he took it. He doesn’t know exactly why he was given this chance yet no one else in this family was, but he concluded that it had to have been the fact that he had spent time in a concentration camp and the German government didn’t want him telling people of the atrocities that went on there. He had to say goodbye to his family and friends and wasn’t given much time to do so. Before he knew it, he was alone on his way to a place he knew nothing about.
“The Nazis had so much power and so much madness in them that they were breaking in houses and stealing things and pretending this was all a political investigation.”
“Life in the camp, you had nothing.”