{"id":2111,"date":"2020-04-21T06:09:21","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T06:09:21","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-25T12:23:19","modified_gmt":"2020-07-25T12:23:19","slug":"peter-isaac-brandstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/memory-quilts\/peter-isaac-brandstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Isaac Brandstein"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"\" href=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/tbmq-006.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-752 alignleft\" title=\"click to enlarge image\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/250\/tbmq-006.jpg\" alt=\"tbmq-006\" width=\"250\" height=\"250\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"intro\">Isaac was originally Hungarian. He was born in the Carpathian Mountains and passed away in London. During the war he was in Buchenwald together with his father, who was selected for transport to Auschwitz. Isaac risked death by stepping out of the line and asking permission to go with his father, but the camp commander pushed<\/p>\n<p>him back into line. After the war he came to the UK with the \u2018Hungarian Group\u2019, arriving in Northern Ireland together with Victor Greenberg, and being lodged in a small village called Millisle, which is not far from Belfast. He stayed there for about 5 months before moving to London, where he stayed in a hostel in Golders Green. He trained as an accountant, working in the City for a time. He was a private man and was sadly never able to recover from the traumas of his war-time experiences. He lived for several years in Swiss Cottage, not venturing out, and lost contact with all but the most devoted of his old friends. He spent his final years in Nightingale Care Home. He never married and had no family of his own.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1981 edition of the \u201945 Journal, he wrote an extremely poignant article entitled \u2018Returned From The Dead\u2019 in which he described the painfully long depressive illness he had been enduring for several years and under the shadowof which he found it impossible to emerge.<\/p>\n<p>He described it as being \u2018caught up in the net between the living and the dead.\u2019 He explained that, unlike when he was in the camps, surrounded by people suffering a similar fate, he now felt totally alone. \u2018It was as if my crying was trying to make up for the tears that I should have shed in the Camps, but never did. Not even during the killing of my nearest and dearest.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>He submitted a poem entitled \u2018Thirty Five Years\u2019 for the same journal, celebrating the 35 years that had passed since Liberation. The penultimate stanza reads:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u2018If the whole world\u2019s trees were made into pens,<br \/>\nAnd the world\u2019s rivers and seas were ink,<br \/>\nNot even then could we adequately describe hereunder,<br \/>\nThe debt that we owe to those that died during the Holocaust thunder.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em><strong>Frances Kahan<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Isaac was originally Hungarian. He was born in the Carpathian Mountains and passed away in London. During the war he was in Buchenwald together with his father, who was selected for transport to Auschwitz. Isaac risked death by stepping out of the line and asking permission to go with his father, but the camp commander [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.45aid.org\/COPYLIVE\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}