Pfc. John Franklin of San Francisco, a former displaced Jew now serving in the United States Army in Germany, has located the grave of his father, who died of beatings, torture and starvation while both of them were prisoners of the Nazis.
Young Franklin, 23, who was born in Wuerzburg, fled to Holland with his family in 1938. When that country was overrun by the German Army two years later, the mother was sent to one Nazi camp and the father an son to another. They survived until the closing days of the war when they found themselves in Bergen-Belsen.
Then the Nazis, attempting to keep the prisoners out of the hands of liberating Allied troops, packed them into cattle cars and shipped them into the interior of Germany. On that nightmarish journey the father succumbed to brutality and starvation and was buried in a mass grave alongside the railroad tracks.
Subsequently the youth and his mother were rescued and migrated to the United States where the boy grew up, was educated and eventually drafted into the Army, which assigned him to Germany. The father’s grave was recently discovered by the International Tracing Service and young Franklin journeyed to the grave to recite the traditional Jewish prayers for the dead.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
