Читать книгу The Night of Broken Glass - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Born in the Rhineland in 1894; employed since 1920 by the Oppenheim Bank; married, two children; emigrated to the USA in 1939.

Exactly one year later, the greatest organized pogrom the world has ever seen occurred in Germany. The 1905 pogroms in Russia, the pogroms in Romania and in all the other countries of the world pale in comparison. The latter were only outflows of public opinion and their products, but this one was planned, organized and encouraged by the government. The preceding sufferings, privations, humiliations and horrors cannot be compared with what happened on this single night.

It was the harrowing night of 10 November 1938, when in Germany, in accordance with a very precisely elaborated plan, the homes and shops of Jews were senselessly vandalized, plundered, destroyed and put to the torch. On that night, synagogues and thousands of prayer halls and schools were set on fire at precisely the same time, and fire brigades and police all over Germany were not allowed to leave their quarters unless an express command to that effect had been given. In a single hour on that night, a horde of drunken animals in uniform wrecked the possessions, the past and the future of thousands of people, while bloodthirsty, savage, brutal creatures, decked out in and protected by the brown and black uniforms of the ruling party, slaughtered poor, tormented people in the thousands and sadistically abused thousands of wretched people.

I am going to describe one more time the events of that night, even if some of the details are already known, and even if hundreds of my poor fellow Jews may have suffered still more. I am going to describe them because the memory has still not grown fainter – although in the meantime a year and a half has gone by – and because they were the worst thing that the human mind could have imagined and carried out.

At the beginning of March 1938, all of the Jews in Germany had their passports confiscated. On 27 April 1938, we Jews in Germany who had more than 5,000 marks had to declare our possessions in cash, real estate, jewellery and so on.

In mid-October 1938, I met with a man from Berlin with whom I had had many business dealings, and who I knew had very good connections at the highest levels of the party and the government. Here is exactly what he said to me on that evening: ‘If you knew what was going to happen to you, and if you can justify it to your family and your company, get out of Germany as fast as you can. If not with a passport, then try to sneak across the border somewhere. In Berlin, they are preparing to do dreadful things to the Jews.’ When I explained to him that I had as yet made no preparations to emigrate and in any case would not leave my family in the lurch, he was astonished and said: ‘Soon there won’t be a single Jew left here who can or would want to emigrate.’

When I asked him what was actually going on, and he saw my frightened face, he said: ‘Give me your word not to say anything to anyone; it could cost me my life. Soon Jews will have to make enormous financial payments; they are going to be housed in ghettos, and Jews up to the age of sixty are going to be put in concentration camps to do forced labour. Barracks for this purpose are being built everywhere. In addition, all the synagogues are to be closed.’ I emphasize that I was told this around the middle of October 1938, and the assassination of Herr vom Rath, which the German government claimed was what triggered the Jewish pogroms in November 1938, did not take place until the early days of November 1938. I was very depressed and at home I could not conceal my feelings. My wife, to whom I have always told my joys and concerns, and who shared everything with me in true companionship, saw that I was depressed, and I told her what I knew. So my wife is the living witness to the truth of what I have said.

The abominable and damnable act in Paris had taken place: the Jew Grynszpan had shot the German vom Rath, and the external and probably very welcome excuse for carrying out and stepping up the planned measures against Jews described above had been provided. Everyone in Germany knew and felt that all Jews would have to pay a dreadful price for this act of an irresponsible young man. The occasion for the attack in Paris was the expulsion of all Polish Jews from Germany. May it also be said here that, since Grynszpan’s parents were also affected by this expulsion, the true and perhaps sole reason for his act is to be found in the regime’s order.

On a Monday morning in October 1938,¹ the Gestapo suddenly appeared at the homes of all Jews of Polish ancestry in every city in Germany and told them to vacate their apartments within five hours, taking all their moveable goods with them. The unfortunate people packed up the most indispensable of their meagre possessions and gathered, weeping and lamenting, at their assembly points. In the city where I was employed, the poor gathered on the busiest square in the middle of the city. The children had been taken out of school and picked up by officials; hungry, frightened and crying loudly, they ran to their parents. The cordoning officials had great difficulty holding back the excited and shouting people who had gathered around the square. A few Aryan men and women who had expressed their criticisms too loudly were led away. An Aryan doctor took out of the crowd a Polish woman who was about to give birth and accompanied her to the hospital. Two days later the child was born.

The others were led away to the railway station and there loaded onto cattle wagons, and we Jewish men used lorries and cars to help them load their few possessions until our hands were bleeding in the freezing air. A girlfriend of my daughter’s later wrote to her from a camp on the Polish border: ‘Had the train run off the rails and killed us all, we would have been better off.’

On the evening of 9 November 1938, the SA brown-shirts and the SS black-shirts met in bars to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the day of the failed putsch in Munich. Around eleven o’clock in the evening, I came home from a Jewish aid organization meeting and I can testify that most of the ‘German people’ who a day later the government said were responsible for what happened that night lay peacefully in bed that evening. Everywhere lights had been put out, and nothing suggested that in the following hours such terrible events would take place.

Even the uniformed party members were not in on the plan; the order to destroy Jewish property came shortly before they moved from the bars to the Jewish houses. (I have this information from the brother of an SS man who took an active part in the pogroms.)

At 3 a.m. sharp, someone insistently rang at the door to my apartment. I went to the window and saw that the streetlights had been turned off. Nonetheless, I could make out a transport vehicle out of which emerged about twenty uniformed men. I recognized only one of them, a man who served as the leader; the rest came from other localities and cities and were distributed over the district in accordance with marching orders. I called out to my wife: ‘Don’t be afraid, they are party men; please keep calm.’ Then I went to the door in my pyjamas and opened it.

A wave of alcohol hit me, and the mob forced its way into the house. A leader pushed by me and yanked the telephone off the wall. A leader of the SS men, green-faced with drunkenness, cocked his revolver as I watched and then held it to my forehead and slurred: ‘Do you know why we’ve come here, you swine?’ I replied, ‘No,’ and he went on, ‘Because of the outrageous act committed in Paris, for which you are also to blame. If you even try to move, I’ll shoot you like a pig.’ I kept quiet and stood, my hands behind my back, in the ice-cold draught coming in the open door. An SA man, who must have had a little human feeling, whispered to me: ‘Keep still. Don’t move.’ During all this time and for another twenty minutes, the drunken SS leader fumbled threateningly with his revolver near my forehead. An inadvertent movement on my part or a clumsy one on his and my life would have been over. And if I live to be a hundred, I will never forget that brutish face and those dreadful minutes.

In the meantime, about ten uniformed men had invaded my house. I heard my wife cry: ‘What do you want with my children? You’ll touch the children over my dead body!’ Then I heard only the crashing of overturned furniture, the breaking of glass and the trampling of heavy boots. Weeks later, I was still waking from restless sleep, still hearing that crashing, hammering and striking. We will never forget that night. After about half an hour, which seemed to me an eternity, the brutish drunks left our apartment, shouting and bellowing. The leader blew a whistle and, as his subordinates stumbled past him, fired his revolver close to my head, two shots into the ceiling. I thought my eardrums had burst but I stood there like a wall. (A few hours later I showed a police officer the two bullet holes.) The last SA man who left the building hit me on the head so hard with the walking stick he had used to destroy my pictures that a fortnight later the swelling was still perceptible. As he went out, he shouted at me: ‘There you are, you Jewish pig. Have fun.’

My poor wife and the children, trembling with fear, sat weeping on the floor. We no longer had chairs or beds. Luckily, the burning stove was undamaged – otherwise our house would have gone up in flames, as did many others.

Towards dawn, a police officer appeared in order to determine whether there was any damage visible from the outside, such as broken window glass or furniture thrown out into the street. Shaking his head, he said to us, as I showed him the bullet holes from the preceding night: ‘It’s a disgrace to see all this. It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had to stay in our barracks.’ As he left, the officer said: ‘I hope it’s the last time this will happen to you.’

The next evening people were afraid that the same thing might happen again. But on that night, the police continually patrolled the streets, especially in the area where there were Jewish houses. A police officer, who was a friend of mine, later told me: ‘On the second night, every policeman carried two revolvers. It’s too bad that the gang didn’t come back.’

Two hours later, another police officer appeared and told me exactly this: ‘I’m sorry but I have to arrest you.’ I said to him, ‘I have never broken the law; tell me why you are arresting me.’ The officer: ‘I have been ordered to arrest all Jewish men. Don’t make it so hard for me, just follow me.’ My wife accompanied me to the police station. In front of the door to my house, the officer said to us: ‘Please go on ahead, I will follow you at a distance. We don’t need to make a spectacle of this.’

At the police station, the officers were almost all nice to us. Only one officer told my wife: ‘Go home. You may see your husband again after a few years of forced labour in the concentration camp, if he’s still alive.’ Another officer, who had been at school with me, said to his comrade: ‘Man, don’t talk such nonsense.’ To my wife he said: ‘Just go home now, you’ll soon have your husband back.’ A few hours later my little boy came to see me again. The experiences of that terrible night and my arrest were too much for the little soul, and he kept weeping and looking at me as if I were about to be shot. The police officer I knew well took the child by the hand and said to me: ‘I’ll take the child to my office until you are taken away. If the boy saw that, he’d never forget it for the rest of his life.’ A last kiss, a last look. When and where will I see my wife, my children and my 75-year-old mother again? What do they want now from us poor, beleaguered, tormented people?

The transportation to the prison in the nearby city took place in the bitter cold in an open car. When we arrived, there were ten of us men, and we were put in a huge cell in which about sixty men were already waiting for us. The air was heavy with the smell of wet clothing and cold, stale food. The first person to greet me was an ophthalmologist whom I knew, along with his son, a small, pale boy who had turned sixteen a week before. Both were wearing pyjamas; they’d been taken out of bed and had not been allowed to get dressed or to say farewell to the wife and mother. Four days later, the child was taken away from the father and transferred, still in his pyjamas and slippers, to the concentration camp in Dachau. The father’s pain was hardly bearable. Immediately after I was released, I used all my energy and connections to make it possible for the young man to emigrate, and in that way to save him from the concentration camp, that hell. Four weeks later, the poor parents were able to hold their child in their arms again, and one day later he was in England. The parents are still in Germany …

We were in the big cell for three hours as the daylight slowly faded and it grew dark. As if by magic, a light bulb on the ceiling lit up. Then the door opened and a guard led us into the prison courtyard. High walls all around, and high up small, poorly lit and barred windows. Yesterday evening still at home, in the peaceful family circle: this evening everything senselessly destroyed and annihilated and scattered. The women and children amid the ruins and devastation, the men in prison. And nowhere a gleam of salvation, nowhere a ray of hope. Moreover, this was Friday evening, the beginning of the Sabbath …

Ten minutes later the high lattice gates closed behind us; we were incarcerated. The next morning the newspaper report said that Jewish men had had to be taken into protective custody ‘in order to protect them from the people’s wrath’.

Three men were put in each individual cell; we could hardly move. Laughing, the prison guard explained to us: ‘We were not expecting such a crowd.’ Then there was a dark broth, probably supposed to be coffee, a few slices of bread and a little jam, and the cell door closed again. The first night in prison. Suddenly the light went out and we sat there in the dark. We spread our overcoats on the floor and tried to rest. Sleep was impossible. The hard ground prevented my body from relaxing, my head was tired from brooding and thinking, and my thoughts were at home with my wife and children and my old mother. My heart was agitated by the events of the last twenty-four hours, my thoughts constantly turned around the questions ‘Why are you here, how long will it last, what is going to happen to you?’

Every quarter of an hour, the clock in the nearby church tower chimed. If I stood on the table, I could look out over part of the city, which I knew well. A part of the city in which I had worked; good friends of mine used to live not far from the prison. Why, oh God, do you chastise your people? Why must we of all people suffer so much for the name of justice? What have we done wrong?

At six in the morning, the light came back on, as if lit by spectral hands, and a new day began. We had to get up immediately, clean the floor and wash ourselves in a tin basin. We had to relieve ourselves in a tin pail and were very ashamed. At seven o’clock, we had to wash out our vessels in the prison corridor, and then there was coffee. The days were endlessly boring. Smoking and playing cards, if we had cards and something to smoke, were allowed. There were endless conversations about the meaning of everything on earth and about the meaning of everything eternal; never has there been so much philosophizing as among Jewish men in German prisons during these days.

Monday, 14 November 1938, four in the afternoon. A neverending, dull, rainy day was slowly coming to a close. Then the door opened and we were once again led down to the courtyard. We saw each other for the first time since our arrest. Unrecognizable, these pale, tired, emaciated faces, framed by beards. Big, black eyes that bore within them the suffering of generations, of centuries of torments endured. Eight hundred men in a small prison courtyard, eight hundred innocent men, husbands, sons, fathers and grandchildren … A few Gestapo officers were waiting for us, big fat faces. Importantly, carrying portfolios, they went up and down the front line, well rested, well fed, and in the mood to commit new infamies.

After an hour in the drizzling rain, our clothes stuck to our bodies, we were exhausted, our nerves ready to break. Then we were called up one by one before a row of young Nazi party doctors wearing riding boots and carrying riding whips who glanced fleetingly at our haggard, weary bodies. When it was my turn, I saw an elderly forensic doctor I knew, who waved to me and called: ‘You will be examined by me.’ The young party doctors let me pass, and the elderly doctor examined me very carefully. After a minute, I knew my fate. ‘Physically not sufficiently developed for use in the work service.’ My knees almost gave way; God had clearly put his hand over me to protect me from worse, for I had escaped the concentration camp by the skin of my teeth. I was hardly able to give the old doctor a grateful glance, because it was the turn of the next fellow-sufferer. My two cellmates, both men over sixty, drew the same lot. In this night we slept a little for the first time, although our bodies and our nerves were stretched to the limit.

The days dragged on. Every day consisted of thirteen endless hours from the time the light was turned on to the time it was turned off. Thirteen hours filled with idleness, brooding and reflection, with meaningless talk, with eating and drinking, insofar as we could digest the prison food, with nothing, nothing at all. We heard the noise of the street outside, children playing, the sounds of the large barred building, the doorbell, people going up and down iron stairways, the convicts marching in the prison courtyard, the guards shouting orders, always the same, always the same … Great God, how much longer still and why all this, why? From one quarter-hour to the next on the nearby church tower, another day, another evening. How many more days, how many evenings, how many months, how many years?

Wednesday, 16 November 1938, the Day of Prayer and Repentance in Germany. Suddenly, at five in the morning, the light went on, and we got up, thinking our watches were running an hour late. Somehow we vaguely felt that this was a special day. At 5.30, the coffee was handed out before the cells were cleaned. At 6.00, cell doors on the corridor were opened, names were read. The door to our cell remained closed, nobody was paying any attention to us. At 6.15, all the Jews whose names were read appeared in the dark prison courtyard. Jews in overcoats, without overcoats, in pyjamas and slippers. Names were read out by lamplight, names of friends, acquaintances, people, brothers, fellow believers, names, names … Then, like a thunderbolt, the truth struck us: they were going to the concentration camp, to the hell from which there is no escape. There is only work and hunger, disease and the sadism of the guards; there is only DEATH, DEATH, DEATH …

Under our cell window, those doomed to die were handed over to the police. The names were read once again, then came a command that I will hear until the end of my life: ‘Guards on the outside, Jews in the middle. Break step!’ Tears rolled down our faces, we did not wipe them away, farewell, you brothers, farewell, you friends, God be with you, you Jewish men, God protect your wives, your children, your mothers, your fiancées, your grandparents. Farewell! Their steps faded slowly away in the gloom of a grey, foggy morning; then again a police officer shouted, and in the distance they were already departing. Slowly the gates of the prison closed again …

That is what happened on the morning of Prayer and Repentance Day in all the prisons of Germany, in the year 1938!

Two days later, when I had been ordered to go down the prison corridor to get food, someone put a packet of cigarettes in my hand. A voice whispered: ‘From Frau I.’ I looked round, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness. A hand took me by the shoulder and shoved me onward, and I didn’t know where the gift came from. My brain worked feverishly. Then I understood. Frau I. was the wife of a good Aryan acquaintance whom I knew to have connections with the Gestapo. My cellmates regarded the packet of cigarettes like children in front of a Christmas tree. I opened the packet, and out fell a note, written on a typewriter: ‘You will be released on Saturday at eleven o’clock. We are all working to get you released. I.’

My head was spinning; I had to sit down. My cellmates saw to me and mopped my face with cold water; my heart was racing. I had to lie down on the straw mattress. Another eighteen hours to go, seventeen, sixteen. The light went out, my cellmates gave me the straw mattress and they bedded down on their overcoats, even though they were twenty years older than I. I lay there and thought, from one quarter-hourly stroke of the clock tower bell to the next. Was it really my last night in prison, the last night away from my wife, children and mother? Did they know that the hour of liberation was approaching? Seven hours more, six hours, dawn broke slowly, the light went on. Got up, cleaned the cell, got coffee, drank coffee, the light went out. A grey, rainy day appeared on the horizon, the sounds in the street began, bells rang in the great, grey building, the lockstep of marching convicts, commands. Three hours to go, two hours …

Saturday, 19 November 1938, 10.45 in the morning. Nothing, nothing at all. 10.50, everything was just as it was on other days. I sat spellbound on the prison stool and listened to the sounds in the prison corridor. 10.55, nothing – nothing at all. Was this another sadistic act on the part of a Gestapo officer who knew something about a connection between me and the I. family? My cellmates were looking at me with concern; my face must have been ghostly white.

Eleven o’clock. The door opened, the guard came in and said: ‘Hand over your things, order from the Gestapo; you are to be released immediately.’ The blood roared in my ears. I could hardly stand up. The officer: ‘Move, we still have more to do.’ A quick farewell to my cellmates, greetings to their families, the cell door closed behind me. I was in the corridor with the guard. Down the iron stairway to the discharging officer. With a smile on his face he said: ‘Go home, now, we don’t want you. Not you or the others, either.’ The last iron door closed behind me, I was free again.

First to my office. The women co-workers came towards me, tears streaming down their faces, and even the men’s eyes were moist. Everybody talking, relating and listening to the stories. Torrents of words. Among other things, I heard that men of the Jewish race who had hidden on 10 and 11 November had not been arrested.

During the train ride home it was obvious that passions were still high about the events of the pogrom night. One man talked about his neighbour, and said: ‘Never have I laughed so much as on that night when the Jews danced around their houses. For the first time, I saw the Jewish whores working, when they had to use their slender fingers to pick up the shards of window glass in the street. They bled like pigs.’ A second man replied: ‘The best came the next morning when the teachers took the schoolchildren to see the Jewish temple and the Jews’ homes. We’ve cleaned them out once again. They showed that our Führer can rely on his boys.’ Here the two men got out of the train. I had tears in my eyes and my heart pained me. Oh Germany, Oh fatherland – it was precisely the date on which I had returned, twenty years earlier, from the Great War. Once again I was coming home, but this time from prison, innocent, and again I was a weary, defeated man.

When I had returned home on this day twenty years earlier, my late father had picked me up at the railway station. His joy that his only son had returned uninjured from adversity and death had shown in his face. Relatives and friends were waiting for me, and it was a festive, blessed day. Although at that time I was inwardly upset by the fate of the German people, over the defeat of the German army, in my young heart trust and belief in the future lived on, and I knew that even the severest test and the most difficult time of suffering would some day come to an end.

Today I returned home, my heart full of sadness and despair, full of concern about my family and our future. I felt that, from now on, all was lost, that after these events we could no longer stay in Germany, and that we would have to share the fate of our ancestors: take up our staffs and roam, roam …

At home, the damage that could be seen from outside the house had been cleaned up as much as possible. Christian neighbours had lent us a few pieces of furniture so that we could at least eat and sleep. The people in my home town were for the most part very disheartened by what had happened. My wife told me that during the first days a few Aryan women, particularly workers’ wives for whom she had earlier done many favours, had come to see her. One woman had wept loudly and said: ‘That is now the thanks you get for your love and generosity: it’s enough to make one despair of humanity.’ Another woman said: ‘This is worse than in Russia. The swine who ordered this destruction ought to have their necks wrung.’ Under cover of darkness, one of my acquaintances said to me: ‘This time it was your temples, the next time it will be our Catholic churches.’ (People no longer dared speak with us in broad daylight.)

At Christmas 1938, I received a card and a gift package from a decent old friend who was a Christian. On the card he had written: ‘And no matter how long winter endures, spring must come again.’²

After 10 November, my children were forbidden to attend secondary school. Since 1933, my daughter had been in a convent school and was treated very well by the Catholic nuns there. When this school was shut down at Easter in 1938 and the large building transformed into a factory, she moved to a high school in the nearby city. Since Easter 1938, my son had been attending the grammar school in another city. Before he was accepted, I visited the headmaster of the school to ask whether he thought it would be wise for me to send my son to his school. This was his answer: ‘I am a good Catholic and have been doing this job for more than thirty years. In my school, only ability and knowledge count; the party does not yet control things here. Don’t worry, you can send your son here.’

My son, who was then nine years old, was from the outset placed by his teacher on a bench all by himself, while the other children sat two-by-two on their benches. Once, he dropped a pencil on the floor and a classmate tried to pick it up. The teacher shouted: ‘Let the Jew pick up his own pencil!’ Another time the teacher wanted change for a coin. When it turned out that my son was the only pupil in the class who could give him change, the teacher said scornfully, ‘No, I don’t touch Jewish money.’ My child was not allowed to swim with the others during swimming class, and the teacher said to him in front of the other pupils: ‘Go into the Jordan with your flat feet. You are not allowed to contaminate German water.’ In class, he was not called upon a single time and his written work was not corrected. Only once, when the class was to write an essay on the theme ‘Adolf Hitler, saviour of the German people from the worldwide Jewish plague’ did the teacher call to my boy: ‘Now let’s hear what you’ve written.’ When my son said, correctly, that his father had forbidden him to write this essay, the teacher wanted to have nothing more to do with him. Because of this gem of a teacher, the boy no longer existed in the world. On the other hand, the other teachers were good to him.

When this tormenting of an innocent child became unbearable, I had to make the difficult trip to see the headmaster and tell him what was going on. He said to me: ‘This is all news to me and hard to understand. When I inspected the classes a few days ago, the teacher asked your son a question and got a satisfactory answer.’ My son confirmed what the director said, and the whole thing bears eloquent testimony to the baseness of the German teacher. The headmaster also said: ‘Unfortunately, I cannot take action against the teacher concerned. He is the chairman of the teachers’ association, and a protest would cost me my position.’

When Jewish children were forbidden to pursue higher education, my son, who was then ten years old, said to me: ‘Father, if you had forced me to continue going to school just a little longer, I would have thrown myself under a train.’³ My hair stood on end with horror, and a shiver ran down my back. What must have happened in the mind of this boy, how must educators in the new Germany have tormented him that such resolutions could be formed in the heart of an innocent 10-year-old?

In late January 1939, my beloved old mother had a stroke brought on by the distress of the preceding weeks. For three days she lay unconscious before she was fortunate enough to be taken from this world. During these three days, just after it got dark, Aryan men and women visited us in order to enquire about her condition. A Christian woman whom my mother had always supported and whose children she had helped to bring up was with her day and night. This woman said over and over: ‘Never did I love my own mother as much as this true and good mother who now lies there so helpless. She was always ready to help me and my family in word and deed, and now we cannot help her. When she dies, I will lose my mother a second time.’

One of this woman’s sons, a soldier, came in the evening, in full uniform, even though in Germany soldiers were strictly forbidden to enter Jewish houses, to see how my mother was doing. Tears rolled down his face when he said goodbye to her. ‘Never have I so much respected a Jewish woman as I do your mother,’ he said. In the evenings, neighbours sent coffee and fruit, even though these treats were by now very rare in Germany, and wished her a prompt recovery. The whole town knew that the old woman lay dying. And yet schoolboys leaving school at noon stood in front of the house and sang:

Now the Jew is

Finally finished.

Sad German youth …

To us mourners, my mother’s burial seemed like a dog’s burial. The hearse took her to the cemetery. Some twenty Jewish men and women followed at a distance on the pavement, to avoid attracting attention. Aryan acquaintances and neighbours had sent messages saying things like: ‘We mourn with you’ or ‘Our thoughts are with you’ or ‘We will never forget her.’ Within an hour, we were home again, alone with our heavy hearts and thoughts.

When I was in prison after the pogrom night in November, my wife telegrammed her old American uncle in connection with an affidavit. To tell the truth, up to that point I would have found it very difficult to leave the old homeland and my parents’ house, where I had dreamed my youthful dreams and where my two children had grown up. But when I stood in my pyjamas with that drunken vandal holding his revolver to my head on that cold, dreadful night, while other inebriated thugs in brown and black uniforms were destroying my house, I made up my mind. I was going to get out of this country of infamy and disgrace, where people who had never in their lives done anything bad could no longer live and breathe, merely because they were born Jews. Where Jewish children were beaten by others their age, where they were insulted and had stones thrown at them, because they were Jewish children. The poison of persecution, cast like a terrible seed into children’s hearts and souls, will inevitably yield a hundredfold harvest that in the end will turn against those who spread this poison. In this country, there can no longer be any place for members of such a people whose first and most noble article of belief is: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’

So we prepared to emigrate. The few possessions that we were left with after 10 November were quickly packed. When we had to go to the American consulate in Stuttgart, we found in that city no restaurant or café that did not bear the inscription: ‘Jews not welcome here.’ Unfortunately, the few places where Jews could find lodging, to which I had first turned, were also full. Late at night, we were lucky enough to find beds in a small inn. When we told the friendly innkeeper we were Jews, she said: ‘I don’t care. I have not put up the signs. Any decent person who pays for his room and meal can stay in my inn.’ When we got our visas the next day, there was no one in that whole city happier than we were.

I spent the last days in Germany saying farewell to the old homeland. With my children I walked in the spring weather the old familiar paths that I had walked so often in the course of four decades, the paths through woods and fields that I had first trodden holding my parents’ hands, every tree and house evoking a memory. Never in my life was I to walk those paths again, for we had to rip out of our hearts the memory of almost half a century of our lives.

And this, because a man appeared, the leader of a nation of eighty million people, who declared that a Jew can have no homeland, that Jews are nomadic peoples who belong to Asiatic desert tribes and who must always wander and leave behind them a devastated world …

Back to the cemetery, in which four generations of my ancestors rest. The gravestones, overturned four times by the Hitler Youth, had been put more or less straight again. There was the grave of an elderly couple from the neighbouring town, who were well known to us, and who had been murdered by the Nazis on the night of 10 November, bound together with wire and thrown into the river; their bodies had surfaced a few days later. We were assigned to bury the dead, ‘but no burial mound must be visible.’ We waited at the cemetery for the dead, who were brought there in a cart. We buried both of the old people in the same grave, and we did not make a burial mound.

So rest in peace, beloved ancestors, and may your blessing accompany us in our wanderings. Wherever we are, our thoughts will always be with you, and you will always be with us. We are not leaving your graves behind willingly; we are being driven away. So we put your last resting place in the hand of our God.

A last glance backwards, and then that, too, was past, over.

My children, most of whose lives had been lived in the shadow of these difficult and terrible events, were delighted by the prospect of a sea voyage. Their thoughts were taken up entirely by the ship that was to take them to the new, unknown land, and by the land itself. Their hearts easily embraced the new future; nothing bound them to the land of repression and persecution. In contrast, we adults were leaving the graves of our ancestors, our youth and our childhood behind us. For what had we lived, fought, suffered and striven for almost half a century? For what?

To be sure, we have to forget, we must forget, what lies behind us. But can one just wave away the experiences of half a century of life? May my children, for whose sake we had to leave our homeland behind, succeed in building a new future in the new land. May God bless the country that has welcomed with open arms us poor, stricken people. And yet, I know that the shadows of the past will creep into my dreams. The homeland that I have had to leave in order to escape the death threats of the Nazi gangs, in order to find a new and final homeland, will live on in my memories and dreams, the old paths, the buildings, the mountains, forests and fields. What does the earth of our homeland know about the monstrous products of these hellish fantasies of a savage regime that took from hundreds of thousands of people their freedom, their honour and their lives?

Earth is earth and people remain people.

Our Aryan friends commiserated with us as we made our preparations to leave. They brought us gifts, flowers and good wishes. A few of them said to me: ‘Take me with you. Here we’re headed for war, and we have no desire to play war again.’ Others said: ‘You’re lucky, we envy you. You’re going towards freedom; we’re staying here under the rule of violence.’

Two Aryan friends accompanied us to the railway station, even though we were leaving at noon. With tears in his eyes, one of them said on the platform: ‘Some day we will pick you up here again in triumph.’ As the train pulled out, tears were rolling down his cheeks, and for a long time we looked back at them, waving their handkerchiefs. Germany lay behind us.

But not yet; there was still the border to cross. In our compartment sat a Dutch businessman who was returning from the Orient, and a Dutch woman who was coming from South Africa to visit her aged mother in Holland. Half an hour before the border, the door of the compartment opened and an SS man bellowed: ‘Any Jews in here?’ I identified myself, and there followed an excruciating interrogation regarding the purpose of our trip, an interrogation so nasty that even the foreigners blushed. Among other things, the SS man said: ‘If only all you swine had left Germany in 1932.’ That was our final farewell from Germany, the last words we heard spoken by a German. The two foreigners had understood every word, and, as the train finally rolled over the border, the Dutch woman said: ‘Now be glad: nowhere else in the whole world will you ever hear such words again.’

Some Dutch friends who had often been our guests in Germany met us at the station. They invited us into their home and slowly we overcame our anxiety about appearing in public, our dread at walking down a busy street and saying anything. They showed us pictures of Jewish houses and synagogues that had been burned in Germany, which they had themselves taken in border towns.

The night we left on the spotlessly clean Dutch ship was dark and rainy, and it was hard for us to say goodbye to our friends. A final expression of good wishes, a tearful glance, and we were alone. Two days later we had a last view of the English coast in the brilliant sunshine. Farewell, Europe, adieu, Old World …

We passed by the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour on a sunny summer morning. We had found our way to our new home in the land of humanity, in the land of freedom. Like a bad dream, the time of subjugation and deprivation of rights lay behind us. We felt that this country, which welcomed us with open arms, should and must become a new homeland for us poor refugees. We wanted to do everything we could to become good and respected citizens; we wanted and had to forget all the tribulations behind us.

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that every word in my account is the simple truth. Hatred has not guided my pen, only the truth and the courage to tell it. Everything that I had in the way of notes and letters was destroyed or taken away by unfettered beasts on that terrible night. My desk was smashed and senselessly ransacked, and I destroyed the rest so as not to compromise anyone. If I constantly emphasize that with few exceptions my earlier Aryan friends and acquaintances were good and generous to us right up until our departure, that means that in their hearts a large part of the German people did not approve or participate in the anti-Semitic pogrom. Were it otherwise, I could not write these lines today on my way to the land of freedom without concern for the lives of those dear to me. Then those unfortunate fellow Jews who are now still having to maintain their miserable existence in Germany would certainly no longer be alive.

If the majority of the more mature German people had even a fraction of the regime’s anti-Semitism, if the pogrom mood into which the German people is whipped up from time to time did not scare off the more rational part of the population, the last Jew would have left Germany long ago. The government agitates and stirs up the people until bloody violence takes place somewhere, and then sanctimoniously declares that this is the ‘voice of the people’ and that the government has never told anyone to kill even one Jew. This tactic has long since been seen through by everyone. An employee of my tax office who wears the party insignia told me, when this subject came up as I was consulting him about my taxes: ‘All this has the mark not of the devil’s cloven hoof but of Goebbel’s clubfoot!’

On the other hand, the young people are contaminated from the outset. The poison systematically injected into them leads them to become liars, thieves and murderers. The youths who were sent into Jewish synagogues and homes on 11 November 1938 to finish off the destruction started by their fathers and brothers are called by Adolf Hitler ‘Germany’s pride and hope’.