My wife's grandfather was a prisoner at Buchenwald for years, for the crime of being a Czech man born in 1921 in the Sudetenland. He believed he only survived because he was an excellent carpenter.

I only met him twice before he died, but many pieces of his excellent furniture are still at my in-laws homes, and I've been to his old workshop in the house he lived in nearly all his life and where his daughter moved in to care for him and his wife in their last years.

He walked home after the war from Buchenwald. I've seen pictures of him from that time looking like a living skeleton in a nice suit.

It is strange to think that he must have known Ilse Koch, as he built and repaired the fine furniture of camp leaders. I'm sure he had many stories, but according to my wife, he basically never talked about those years.