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
