The 48-year-old former editor of the Neue Freie Presse, [Kurt] Libesny, was arrested on 10th November, held for one day and so badly mistreated with blows that one of them smashed his spectacles and the splinter that penetrated his left eye led to the blinding of that eye. Released from prison, the unfortunate man returned home and – shot himself.

From a letter of a formerly very well-to-do Viennese Jewish house owner, "What is more I do not need to wrack my nervous brain about departure, as for some days the possibility of emigration has become 100% harder. In order to obtain the Steuerunbedenklichkeit and with that the passport, I would have to pay the following taxes:

which cannot be raised. As the first instalment of the Kontribution has to be paid on 15th December and I no longer possess RM. 1,000.- in assets, it will probably come to an executive sale of the house. The estimated value will be determined by the treasurer, the calling price is from experience 50% of the true value, so it will certainly be purchased, and the upshot will be I, who in his entire life owed nobody a single Kreuzer, remain a debtor. In a word, if I can get out then my wife and I must obtain the travel tickets from the Kultusgemeinde.

We have had offers of lifts from various people, however I believe we shall forgo those, it is certainly cheaper and more comfortable to go on holiday with the rucksack."

Despite his well-known sense of charity in the city, the letter-writer, in his seventies, received the Ausweisungsbefehl from the Gestapo by 1st February 1939. This decision was given to him in the following manner: he was asked how long he had already been living in Vienna, to which he answered that he had been in Vienna since the fifth year of his life. Thereupon he received the response, "Then you have misused the hospitality of this city for long enough, you have until 1.2.1939 to leave the German Reich."

Reporter: Oskar Hirschfeld, formerly Vienna, now London