Peter Gardosch has achieved what he dreamed of as a concentration camp prisoner in the Dachau subcamp. The images of being separated from his family in Auschwitz accompanied him. After liberation, his path led via Romania and Israel to Germany. Whether as a guest of the Federal President or as a discussion partner for schoolchildren: Gardosch has reconciled himself with Germany. Hitlerism”, he says, was a ‘serious illness that afflicted the land of poets and thinkers’.