They Sang Louder

Cold and cramped, Arno found himself riding in a closed boxcar on one of Himmler's death trains. He hadn't thought beyond the killing part of his plan. He deviated only slightly. His inexperience in trying to help a friend was a subversive act. Perhaps, if he had left the country sooner he would be on a different train. Now, there would be no way to help his father. In the camps he and his father would experience firsthand the insanity of the new German State which would devour even its own citizens to achieve its goals. Arno was only ten years old living in Nuremberg when Hitler came to power. Though his family was Lutheran, he learned quickly about anti-Semitism growing up in the heart of Nazism. He witnessed the rallies, deportations, the Kristallnacht pogrom and Himmler's death trains. When his father was sentenced to Dachau by a revenge seeking Nazi blockleiter, Arno planned his revenge. He joined the Hitler Youth and later the SD, the intelligence arm of the SS. There Arno's subversive activities would cause him to be imprisoned in Buchenwald, where his own life would hang in the balance between the brutality of the SS and Allied air raids. This is a tale of life, death, love and survival in a nation gone mad focused on two things; power and the annihilation of an entire race of people. We know from film, photographs and documents that Nazi concentration camps were horrible, cruel and inhuman. Those images and accounts, however, are oftentimes void of the individual brutality and utter lack of sensitivity to human suffering that occurred beyond the range of cameras. They Sang Louder reveals in story form some of those incidents we don't hear about, as viewed and experienced through the eyes a young boy and his family. These were German citizens dangerously struggling to live normal lives in a country they loved, yet secretly opposed to Hitler and his Nazi regime.