Ivar is on the way home when they intercept him, he has just bought pies from the baker for 20 pfennigs. His tormentors kick and slap the six-year-old, two hold him, hurt him with a cigarette on his thigh. Then they throw cardboard and paper into a light shaft, light everything, place Ivar on a grate. "Now let's roast the Jewish boy," the boys cheer.
They leave him alone when Ursel shows up, Ivar's big sister. "She had arms like a catcher, and where Ursel had done, no clover grew," says the elderly man. It is now 80 years since adolescents wanted to set fire to it in front of a bakery in Hamburg's working-class district Horn. Because he was the son of a Jew, a "half Jew" in the crude racial arithmetic of the Nazis.
"The pigs robbed me of their childhood", says Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, confused mane, bright eyes. For more than two decades he bears witness, tirelessly raises his voice against the right. "1504 events in more than 600 cities, and I keep going," cried the 86-year-old. He has a mission, she fills him with vitality and aggressiveness.
Recently he toured North Germany with his documentary "A Life After the Holocaust". Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier encouraged him to film-record one of his lectures, says Buterfas-Frankenthal. He wants to give away 1000 USB sticks to schools and churches: "For the younger generation to realize that such a thing should never happen again, we must protect our tender republic, our values." How thin the lacquer of civilization can be, he learned first-hand.
His father came to the concentration camp as a "bogie soldier"
Buterfas was born on 16 January 1933, just two weeks before Hitler took power. Soon his parents, recognized step-acrobats, received hardly any engagements. The grandparents, Jewish cigarette manufacturers from Dresden, supported the then nine-member family - until they were robbed in the "Aryanization" of their company and hunted out of the country. "That was the work of Dresdner Bank," he scolds.
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Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal: "What do we want to wait for?"Father Felix Buterfas was one of the first interned Jews: in 1934 he was sent to Esterwegen concentration camp in Emsland in northern Germany, notorious as the "hell at the edge of the forest". He was one of the many "bog soldiers" who had to peat bog under inhumane conditions and peat. The mother told the children he was on assembly. When the father was back in Hamburg, he did not speak, cried in his sleep at night. And was soon arrested again.
Little Ivar did not understand much of that until he was enrolled in 1938. He went to school for only six weeks, when one morning in the courtyard the deputy headmaster quoted him. "Buterfas, come on!" Exclaimed the pedagogue, the eyes of the 400 pupils present were directed towards Ivar. "You're a Jew, now pack your things, disappear and never let you look again," the Headmaster barked. This humiliation robs him of sleep until today.
Escape to the east
Mother Orla did not want to be divorced, the family was discriminated against again and again. When Ivar was three years old, they had to move to a so-called Jewish house. Food cards were not available for them, their passports were confiscated, they were not allowed to visit an air raid shelter. In 1941, a mine settled in the immediate vicinity of her house. Ivar and his brother Rolf were hit by splinters. Bleeding, they asked for an air-raid shelter for admission - he was denied them. Rolf was later to die as a result of his injury.
A friend of his father worked for the Gestapo and still protected the Buterfas family. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, he organized her escape from Nazi Germany to the east. Orla Buterfas and her children drowned on a farm in the Tucheler Heide near Gdansk. But they flew open, they were quoted to the district administration. Supposedly to hand over their ration cards to them.
"A trap," says Buterfas-Frankenthal. The family fled back to Hamburg, where they first stayed in an allotment, then in the basement of a bombed-out house. Without water, stove, light, with straw sacks as beds. Only at night did the children sneak out to organize food.
In one of those nights, in the spring of 1945, men in leather coats suddenly appeared in the hiding place of the family. "The Gestapo wanted to take us to the school at Bullenhuser Damm," says Buterfas-Frankenthal. There, shortly before the end of the war, the SS hanged Jewish children, the victims of horrific Nazi attempts (see video).
Dagmar and Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal
But Ivar and his brother Rolf were not there, they searched the streets of Hamburg for edible food. The Gestapo announced their return to take the children with them the next time. The family piled up, hiding in another cellar, shivering with the day of liberation, starving, missing, filthy.
Dogs steal the meat from the bowl
On 3 May 1945, the British soldiers marched into Hamburg, with a white cloth in his hand Ivar ran to the tanks. For the Hanseatic city, the war was over - for the family Buterfas the harassment went on. Like his siblings, Ivar, who was declared a stateless person by the Nazis, only got one alien passport. Every three months, he had to apply for a residence permit from the immigration office.
"I was always a second-class person because there was no third," says the Hamburger. When he and his siblings went to office, they said, "What else do you want in Germany? You are a Jew, you do not like us." In school, the children laughed at him for his surname, Ivar had to listen during the breaks that the Germans were not the only ones who had committed abominations. And that her relatives would have helped Jews.
Father Felix survived the war but left the family. In order to get through, Ivar Panzer slaughtered, went to hamster, stole the meat from the bowl of the dogs of the British. Later he moved across the markets selling cola nuts and hair lotion, kitchen appliances and washing machines. Until he founded a company and made a career as a boxing promoter.
When he wanted to marry in 1952, the registrar demanded from his future wife Dagmar Frankenthal, the child of a Jewish father like Ivar, a confirmation of "Aryan descent." Buterfas-Frankenthal did not receive German citizenship until 1964 - the responsible official had repeatedly put him off and told him lies, he says.
"Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler, Höcke!"
Nevertheless, he remained in Germany, here is his home, here his great task: remember, admonish, shake the next-born. At each lecture: wife Dagmar, who has been married for almost 65 years. "The circumstances remind me of 1933," says Buterfas-Frankenthal with a view to the anti-Semitic assassination in Halle, the assassination of Walter Lübcke by a far-right, the death threats against Claudia Roth and Cem Özdemir.
"What are we waiting for, Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler, Höcke!", He says. Such statements, as well as his tireless commitment against oblivion, have not only brought friends to the winner of the World Peace Prize and the Federal Cross of Merit.
Because Buterfas-Frankenthal was committed to a Nazi memorial in Sandbostel, Lower Saxony, where the community had built a business park on the territory of the former "Stalag XB", he received death threats and was under police protection. "Bulletproof glass," says Buterfas-Frankenthal, knocking on the windowpane of his living room in Bendestorf, Lower Saxony. Security cameras are mounted around the house.
His manipulation of a raffle in 2005 caused criticism: Buterfas-Frankenthal wanted to finance the construction of a glass elevator for the Hamburg memorial St. Nikolai - a monument against the war. "The stupid idiot stuff I could ever do," the old man admits. "But I really wanted to go through this project." He suddenly seems very tired, needs a short break.
Then he talks on, exhausted and combative at the same time. Do not let down like a Buterfas-Frankenthal. "At the latest at 'six' you have to get up again," says the former amateur boxer and smiles.
USB sticks or DVDs with the film by Ivar Buterfas can be ordered at a cost of 15 Euro (including postage) from: Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, Rolf-Meyer-Weg 11, 21217 Bendestorf.