How are you supposed to recite such texts? Reports dealing with pure coincidences or with the few seconds that decide between survival and death in the gas chamber? About unimaginable cruelty, a perfidious killing machine and murderers in uniform who were good fathers in the evenings. Or even about the feelings of guilt with which many Holocaust survivors tormented themselves for decades. Why had they survived but not their parents and siblings?
The actor, director and broadcaster Burchard Dabinnus, 60, who will be reading from the book “Auschwitz never left me” by Susanne Beyer and Martin Doerry in Wörthsee, has no ready answer. He says: “These experiences are so tremendous, you’re almost ashamed when you take them into your own hands and recite them. It seems presumptuous to take over these voices.” He will therefore try to “find a tone to express it emphatically and still factually”. Ultimately, “I can only read it out loud and hand it over to the listener.” It is clear: “Everything is not as far away as we think and hope.”
The Munich native with Lithuanian ancestors grew up in the Steinebach district of Wörthsee, where his grandfather bought and built on a plot of land in the early 1950s. Burchard Dabinnus graduated from high school in Tutzing. In his old home and in Herrsching, he appears again and again, whether with the actress Susu Padotzke (“Hubert without Staller”) or with his own performances and theater projects. The fact that the Wörthsee culture commissioner Juliane Seeliger-von Gemmingen hired him for the reading with cello music on January 27th to commemorate the victims of National Socialism may also have something to do with another circumstance: Dabinnus has often looked into human abysses. In 2020, for example, he recorded a BR podcast about a relationship act: “The murderer and my cousin”.
From the book published in 2015 mirror-Editors who visited ex-concentration camp inmates near the Polish city of Oświęcim living in Israel, the US and Europe, Dabinnus selected five texts. They come from Raphaël Esrail, who was born in Turkey and came to France in the 1930s, from Philomena Franz from a Swabian Sinti family, the famous Breslau cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the Pole Bronia Brandman from a village near Auschwitz and Jehuda Bacon from the Czech Republic. What shook him most about the eyewitness reports were the horrible farewells forced by the Nazis. Those “lightning moments”, for example when a girl standing with her little siblings at the selection ramp decides to run to the other side to her sister who is assigned to work. And survived.
The logs are getting on Dabinnus’ kidneys for another reason, too. “Auschwitz is in the background in our family,” he says. According to him, his grandfather ran an Aryanized grain mill in East Prussia from 1939, “and there are a few questions.” Two years earlier, a consortium of customers had taken over the large industrial company, allegedly to secure the belongings of the Jewish owners. The owners, Hans-Joseph Meyer and his wife, were killed in Auschwitz. His grandfather “was friends with them,” says Dabinnus. It is still unclear whether it is about classic Aryanization or a kind of rescue attempt. He has been in contact with the grandson of the former mill operator, Billy Meyer, and plans to “make a project out of it, but there is no funding yet”.
As the actor from Steinebach says, it is high time for him to research the Nazi past of the Wörthsee district. He remembers founding an environmental protection group in the early 1980s and moving to the Schluifelder Moos for a big cleanup. There he and his helpers not only discovered discarded refrigerators and other dumped garbage, but also a sign for “Adolf-Hitler-Strasse” that was bent in the middle. He has not yet found out where it used to be.
The reading this Thursday, January 27, with Dabinnus and cellist Walther Fuchs begins at 7 p.m. Admission is free, 2 G plus and FFP2 masks are compulsory. We kindly ask you to register at [email protected]. The congregation records the evening.