By January 1939, hundreds of the Jews interned at Dachau concentration camp after the Kristallnacht roundups two months earlier had already died, casualties of SS brutality or the vile conditions. After being forced by camp officials to sign over title to his mother’s home, Martin Selling didn’t think he would leave alive. He had every reason to believe the rumors he heard that the crematories in Munich were working day and night to process the corpses from Dachau, a result of the major influx of Jews into the camp beginning in November 1938.1
But some Jewish prisoners were luckier—about half of those brought in after the roundups had been released to ease overcrowding, with priority given to those who could prove they had a way to get out of Germany. The population decrease in the camp meant there were now enough thin blankets to go around; each inmate could have his own during the frigid nights. Martin found some sewing kits and put his tailoring skills to work, repairing the straw mattresses and prison uniforms. He also gathered some of the cleaning cloths used to prepare the barracks for inspections and sewed them together into a long-sleeved undershirt. Wearing his new shirt under the lightweight prisoner garb helped cut the chill. When the other prisoners saw what he had done, they asked him to make undershirts for them, too. The guards began to notice the shortage. Word spread that at the next inspection, the guards would be looking for the missing cloths, and anyone found with them would be punished. Martin collected all the undershirts he had made, took out the seams, and folded them so as to hide the alterations. When the guards searched, they found only neat piles of cleaning rags, which had somehow reappeared.
The highlight of each day came after the evening meal, when the guards posted a list of the prisoners who would be processed for release the next day. Every day Martin hoped his name would be on the list, and every day he was disappointed. By the time his name appeared—January 27, 1939—he was the last of the nine men who had come in with him on the transport from Nuremberg still at Dachau. His friend Ernst Dingfelder, who had tried so hard to stay kosher in Dachau, had been let out a few days earlier.
Martin didn’t sleep at all that night. Each day had been spent just trying to survive. What lay ahead now? he wondered. As he lay awake, he thought about other inmates, men whose names might never appear on the list.
Another friend he had made at Dachau, Alois Stangl, had been a deckhand on a Danube river barge. He was thirty-five years old, but after five years at Dachau, he looked fifty. Although Stangl was a German Aryan, he had been an outspoken member of the Socialist Party, which meant the Nazis considered him an enemy of the regime. His sister was married to a fervent Nazi official, who had denounced Stangl to the party, leading to his arrest. His release would be an embarrassment to the man who had put him there, he told Martin. Alois Stangl saw no chance of ever getting out of Dachau alive.
The next morning, Martin and the fifty other men being released that day were taken to the communal shower room, where they stripped and showered. Next, they went for a medical examination with a singular purpose: anyone with evidence of maltreatment or injury had to wait until their wounds healed, else they be used to corroborate claims of physical abuse. Martin was pulled aside because of a long scar on his right knee, which he explained to the doctor was an old injury. The SS physician seemed skeptical. Martin had to show he had full range of motion in his knee before he was allowed to continue on.
To the surprise of Martin and the others, the prisoners were handed bags marked with their names; inside were the clothes they had been wearing upon arrival. After they dressed, an SS officer lectured them about the threat of reincarceration if they spoke publicly about Dachau. He also reminded them that they were Jews, not Germans, a refrain that had been drilled into them daily, often while they were being beaten by the guards.
Martin had grown up with Judaism as his religion and German as his nationality. His family celebrated Jewish religious holidays as well as German national holidays. Their ancestral roots in the country went back centuries, and the family included men such as his mother’s brothers, Hugo and Julius Laub, who had fought for the German empire in the trenches of World War I and were proud, patriotic Germans. As Manfred Steinfeld’s uncles, Solomon and Arthur, had also once believed, Martin’s uncles held on to the hope even after Hitler rose to power that their country would not turn on its veterans. But for Germany’s Jewish veterans that was not to be. It had been forcefully impressed upon Martin and his uncles, as well as Manfred and his uncles, and thousands like them, in countless insidious ways, that they were no longer Germans.
Calling the prisoners about to be released verdammte Saujuden (damn dirty Jews), the SS officer warned, “After you leave Germany, the louder you complain abroad, the less likely will you be believed.”
The prisoners boarded the train at the same platform from which they had arrived. A number of armed SS guards boarded with them. Although they were told that they were no longer in custody, but were merely being escorted to Munich, Martin and the others were afraid to show relief or any other emotion. They remained silent. Lulled by the rhythmic sound of the train on the tracks, an exhausted Martin, who had not slept in forty-eight hours, struggled to keep his eyes open. He was about to lose the battle and drift off when a prisoner sitting across from him let out a sharp cry. Martin’s bleary eyes darted open. The man was holding his bloodied nose. The SS had to get in a last lick.
“No one falls asleep in my presence!” hollered the guard who had struck the sleeping man with the butt of his rifle. “So you thought you were already rid of us?”
After that, no one dared to close his eyes. Even after the released prisoners had been turned over to the reception committee from the Jewish Community Council at the Munich station, even after the guards had long since departed, Martin kept looking over his shoulder to see if they were being followed by SS or Gestapo goons.
The next day, Martin took a train to Nuremberg, where he was met by his mother’s sister, Isa Laub. He learned it was Aunt Isa who had secured his release from Dachau; she had sent to the authorities documentation showing he had been accepted to a large, newly formed Jewish refugee camp in England and could emigrate immediately. She told Martin he would be allowed to remain in England until he was able to secure a visa to the United States.
Shortly after his mother’s death in 1936, Martin had applied for a visa to the United States and had begun learning English at a private language institute. The other students were all Jews, who hoped similarly to reach America. With so many wanting to flee Germany, his name was still on a long waiting list for America.
Aunt Isa, who invited Martin to stay with her until he left for England, had some tragic family news. Martin’s father’s brother, Siegfried Selling, a bachelor in his fifties, had been arrested in Nuremberg on Kristallnacht and kept for two days at Gestapo headquarters. There, he had been questioned about his non-Jewish housekeeper, a violation of one of the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited Jews from employing non-Jews, and badly beaten. When Uncle Siegfried was released, he returned to his apartment and took his own life by hanging. Aunt Isa had also heard about her late sister’s house in Lehrberg being sold. Martin told her about the papers he had been forced to sign in Dachau.
Martin had a picture taken, which showed his telltale concentration camp haircut, and took it to the passport office in Nuremberg. On the visa application form, he wrote his full name, Martin Ignatz Selling, and checked the box for Jude. The passport clerk rejected his form, explaining that under the Nuremberg Laws, his middle name must be recognizable as Jewish. The clerk did not think Ignatz qualified. In the absence of such a middle name, he said, all Jewish males must use “Israel,” and all females “Sarah.”
Martin had not been overly alarmed when the Nuremberg Laws were first enacted in 1935. At the time,
