Hello, my name is Franz. I am a survivor of the Holocaust. You may assume that I am Jewish, but that is not the case. I did not wear a yellow star, but I wore a pink triangle. I was arrested by the Gestapo on January 10th, 1942 for homosexuality. I was sent to Auschwitz only to work beside many men, women, and children who would work until the point of exhaustion. We were scared. We were confused. We wanted to escape.
The pink triangle marked me apart from many of the other prisoners. The officers made us work harder than the others. Many of us were worked to death. We had little food, and the adults among us often tried to give our food to those who were young, but after a few months we became hungry, which revealed our greed. We were tortured alongside each other, but we also suffered different fates.
Some time later, around a year after I had been arrested, I, and all the other men with pink triangles were gathered into the medical building, and one of the so-called doctors looked us over and forcibly undressed us. Our torturers went down the line, violently castrating every man with a pink triangle. I was told by another prisoner that our screams could be heard across the camp. It’s hard to say what was the worst part about my imprisonment at Auschwitz, but this event was up there with the times I went a week without food.
In the next few years, I saw many collapse from exhaustion and abuse. Those who I had almost become friends with died. I was lucky to be alive. One day, the Nazi officers took role and evacuated the majority of the prisoners. Most of the Jews went to march, but those of us with pink triangles stayed.
There were rumors about what would happen to us, we all assumed that we would be killed soon after the others left. There were rumors of hope though, too. Rumors that the Allied forces were closing in, and that’s why the Nazis had to evacuate the camp.
The next week, the Allies came to rescue us. It was the happiest day of our lives. They brought food, clean water, warm clothes, and good news. The Nazis were losing the fight, and in a few months this came to fruition.
It was a chaotic but joyful time for those of us who had been in the Nazi camps. Most of us were placed in displaced persons camps. I lived in a camp for two months, looking for a place to work and live and restoring my health.
Near the end of the second month, officers (I was not sure whether they were Allies and Germans or just the new German soldiers) gathered the few of us who had worn pink triangles in the camps and reviewed the documentation of the supposed crimes we had committed before entering the concentration camps.
They told me that, even under the new Germany, I would remain in prison until 1952 for my crime of homosexuality according to paragraph 175. I was enraged. After I began to yell and hit the officer, I was handcuffed and thrown in the back of a military van.
They took me to a jail in Bonn and locked me up there. It was nicer than the camp, I was given two meals a day and was not worried for my life, but I mourned the life that I could have had. I was on my way to a job and a home and becoming reunited with my family but I had come so far only to be imprisoned once again.
Seven years I waited there, to become free. I heard rumors of those who had worn the pink triangle being shunned and shamed. Many of them were rejected from the refugee camps like the one I had stayed in. Most could not find jobs and ended up back in jail because of their relationships with those of the same sex. We had no voice and no rights.
When I was released from jail I was scared. I was alone. I hid my homosexuality out of fear of being caught violating Paragraph 175. I was tempted to date men who were open about their sexual orientation but in the end I was too scared. I lived out the rest of my life in a little apartment above the shop in which I worked. It was a lonely existence, but I got by. The persecution and hatred  directed at those who wore the pink triangle continued long after I died, all the way to the 1990s.