It was hard to recover the lost years. His father didn’t want to talk about his time in the camps, and Kurt’s relationship with Fritz was altogether different. Raised as an all-American boy, Kurt was dismayed by his brother’s communist sympathies. Fritz had acquired his politics by inheritance from their father’s socialism, and in the camps from heroes like Robert Siewert and Stefan Heymann. Life as a worker in Soviet-controlled postwar Austria had confirmed him in his beliefs. There were also religious differences. None of the family aside from Kurt had ever been very devout, and Fritz had
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