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
