The Unwelcome One: Returning Home from Auschwitz

Hans Frankenthal's memoir relates the life-story of a German Jew who returned to his hometown after Auschwitz.

Hans Frankenthal was born in 1926 in Schmallenberg in the Sauerland region of Germany. In 1943, his family was deported to Auschwitz, where his parents were sent at once to the gas chambers. Hans and his brother Ernst survived slave labor in the Monowitz and Mittelbau Dora concentration camps. Liberated by the red army in 1945, Frankenthal returned to Schmallenberg, where he ran a butcher’s shop and worked as a livestock dealer. Today he is a member of the Regional Association of the Jewish Communities of Westphalia and Lippe and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He is also Deputy Chairman of the Auschwitz Committee in the Federal Republic of Germany.