Two German brothers: One in concentration camp and other, a Hitler Youth member

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Kurt Wagner, 79, of Arlington Heights, was born in 1931 in Germany, the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father.

Wagner never knew his father, a railroad mechanic who joined the Nazi Party and became a member of the “brownshirts,” the paramilitary thugs who carried out Hitler’s anti-Jewish campaign in its early days.

His parents separated before his birth. Nobody can say for sure whether it was because of the practical impossibilities of such a mixed marriage under those circumstances — or for the usual reasons marriages fail.

But the result was Wagner went to live with his mother and her parents, while an older brother, Heinz, was raised by his father’s parents.

In the process, these two brothers would experience the alternative realities of life in Nazi Germany:

Wagner and his mother’s family suffered years of persecution before being sent to a concentration camp and eventual death, all except for Wagner, who would find safe passage from the camp to the U.S. and later be adopted by a Chicago family, while brother Heinz would join the Hitler Youth, survive the war and raise a family in Germany.

Many years later, the two brothers would meet and reconcile.

It was the bare outline of this story that prompted Northbrook personal injury lawyer Steven Richards to approach Wagner in 2007 with the idea of writing a book.

More than 3,500 hours of work later, Richards has authored a 200,000-word tome in search of a publisher and a website to help find one, www.sittingontopofthe worldbook.com. This puts him in the odd position of promoting a book not yet in print, which resulted in my sitting Monday morning at the dining room table in Wagner’s modest townhouse.

For our interview, Wagner came prepared with a box of tissues for the sniffling that tends to result from recounting his life story, while Richards brought a loose-leaf binder with reams of documentation unearthed during what he admits has become something of an obsession.

“He knows more about me than I do,” Wagner joked. While that may not be exactly true, it would seem Richards has a better handle on some of the details at this point than Wagner, a retired beauty supply salesman who turns 80 next month, and prompts him accordingly.

Wagner does not often tell his story, which is true of a surprising number of Holocaust survivors.

“I’m not very good at talking about it. I get very emotional,” he says. Indeed, the box of tissues gets a workout, but his mind is clear even when his voice isn’t.

Wagner and his brother Heinz Walker (the family name that Wagner shed when he was adopted) met for the first time in 1978 when he traveled to Germany. As a child, Kurt had been told he had a brother, but not where he lived. Heinz hadn’t even been told that much.

Wagner calls it a “very nice reunion . . . a very emotional reunion.” Only once, though, did they broach the difficult subjects.

“I told him I thought my father was a real bastard. He said you don’t know everything either. . . . I think he was trying to tell me: You were just a kid. You don’t know what was going on.”

Later, Heinz’s wife asked: Can’t you forgive the German people?

“I told them it was not up to me to forgive. I can’t forget.”

Wagner said he harbors no ill-will toward his brother, who made three trips to see him here in the U.S. before his death in 2007.

“He was an innocent bystander as I was. I may have been a little jealous at the time that I was with the Jewish side of the family and was subjected to all this,” Wagner said.

Richards asked if he regrets never being more direct with his brother.

“Oh, sure,” he said, blaming not doing so on the language barrier. “Besides, we were trying to have a good time together.”

What should he have discussed?

“I never knew for sure that he was in the Hitler Youth,” Wagner said [Richards later confirmed it], “but I kind of assumed so, because his father was a Nazi.”

“I say ‘his father.’ He was my father, too,” Wagner said, catching himself, “but I was always kind of ashamed of that.”

Wagner does not forgive his father.

“When you’re a kid and you don’t have a father . . . ” he says, letting the thought hang there as he reaches for a tissue. . . “And here I’d never heard from him, never got a birthday card from him, nothing.”

The father, Alfred Walker, died of a heart attack in 1943. His mother, Ilse (Ettlinger) Walker, was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. Each was 36.