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,
