Alfred Nestor – born a German child, now a British man –  son of a high-ranking SS officer writes an extraordinarily moving and important account of growing up in Nazi Germany and his eventual evacuation under special licence as the first Post-World War Two German child to Ayr in Scotland, and then on to England where he now lives. 

Whilst literally living right next door to Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Hitler’s long time companion; Alfred is innocently unaware of whom the true identities of ‘Uncle’ Hitler and ‘Aunty’ Eva really are. 

As war approached an end in 1945, Soviet reprisals against German civilians were full of raw emotion when the advancing Red Army went on a killing spree; resulting in the spontaneous flight and evacuation of Germans. Trying to stay ahead of the advancing Red Army, Alfred and his mother escaped death by mere seconds. A warm and frank wartime memoir to the current times, this is his story.

With an intense directness, Alfred brings the whole period alive when he paints a powerfully personal and vivid picture of the destructive character of conflict. This remarkable story has many twists and turns, culminating in him being reunited with the father he thought was dead for 53 years! 

ALFRED NESTOR was born in Strausberg, a city in Brandenburg, Germany. Now resident in Liverpool, England, Alfred is married with a large and active family. With an intense directness, Alfred brings the whole period alive when he paints a powerfully personal and vivid picture of the destructive character of conflict. This remarkable story has many twists and turns, culminating in him being reunited with the father he thought was dead for 53 years! 
 
 

With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime. 
    I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere!
     We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.
     As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us. 
     I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.
     As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live. 
     The shrill sound of the train’s whistle, like a whip cutting through the air, pulled me out of it and we moved on ... and I think that was why the poor driver of our train speeded up, as it was obvious that the people who had done this (I now suspect the Russians) were still nearby, and we on this train could meet the same fate ... being slaughtered alive!
I, just like the other children in our carriage, was very upset by what we had just seen, and we were very frightened. It was made worse by the grown-ups in our carriage, who were now all crying.
     I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.

Azriel Feuerstein, a 16-year-old boy, was the sole survivor of his family after they were deported, along with the rest of the Jews during the Second World War German occupation of Hungary, to the human slaughterhouse of Auschwitz Nazi Death Camp. The author penned most of these compelling words as events happened and within months of being liberated from Belsen Concentration Camp by the British Army in 1945. This first time told story makes for a gripping read.
 

This book radically differs from the usual ‘Holocaust Memoir’ by the way the author merges the, sometimes humorous, concentration camp narrative with his conversations with an elderly Swedish lady, Fröken (Miss) Ulle, who worked at the boarding school that took him in after the dangerously thin 25-kilogram teenager spent months of convalescence in Swedish hospitals. A father and grandfather, Azriel lives in Israel with his family.