...During the moblisation before the Munich conference my father had to place his Opel delivery van at the disposal of the army, and indeed, as I am informed, he received a substantial payment for it from the government and the vehicle back in an impeccable condition in addition, which he sold shortly afterwards. (How can that be explained?)

Shortly afterwards however he received a summons from the Geheime Staatspolizei, in which he was ordered to sell his shop immediately, which until then still seemed to be doing relatively well. The murder in Paris and the new riots, decrees etc. followed. During these days in which the Jewish men by the dozen were fetched from their beds in the morning and taken off to the concentration camp, our former maid Marie, a Catholic from Pomerania, took my father in, and he spent several nights in her home. SA men appeared several times at our flat to take my father away.

During the days of the pogrom no fewer than six male members of my family including my cousin lived at a maiden aunt’s, who had a two-room flat in Moabit. Others spent the night in Grunewald despite the November cold. My cousin’s father, Jewish community chairman in Schwerin, was put in the city’s police prison on the grounds that he had set the synagogue on fire. Two other cousins “died” in the concentration camp...