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Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Imagine the strength of my grandmother, who raised so many children! She lost a son in the First World War, a Jew who sacrificed his life for Germany, as well as her husband, my grandfather, an army chaplain who never returned from the war. My father was as proud a German citizen as could be, an immigrant from Poland who settled in Germany. He first left Poland as an apprentice in fine mechanical engineering for typewriter manufacturer Remington. Because he spoke good German, he made his way to America working on a German merchant ship. He excelled in his trade in America, but missed his
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I was proud to come from Leipzig, which had for 800 years been a centre for art and culture – it had one of the oldest symphony orchestras in the world, and it was a city that inspired Johann Sebastian Bach, Clara Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, writers, poets and philosophers – Goethe, Liebniz and Nietzsche, and many others.
We had huge trade fairs twice a year that my father would take me to – the same ones that had made Leipzig one of the most cultured and wealthy cities in Europe. Leipzig’s location and importance as a trading city made it a nexus for the spread of new technologies and ideas. Its university, Germany’s second oldest, was founded in 1409. The world’s first daily newspaper began publication in Leipzig in 1650. A city of books, of music, of opera. As a boy, I truly believed that I was part of the most enlightened, most cultured, most sophisticated – certainly the most educated – society in the
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When I was six, I asked him why we baked so many when we were only a family of four, and he explained that he would take the extra loaves to the synagogue to give to Jews in need. He loved his family, and his friends. He was always bringing friends home to share dinner with us, although my mother put her foot down and said he could have no more than five people at a time, as no more could squeeze around our table. ‘If you are lucky enough to have money and a nice house, you can afford to help those who don’t,’ he would tell me. ‘This is what life is all about. To share your good fortune.’ My
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He would do things that seemed impossible just to put a smile on my face.
It was very hard even for fortunate people to live, and the Germans were humiliated and angry. People became desperate and receptive to any solution. The Nazi party and Hitler promised the German people a solution. And they provided an enemy.
The Rabbi who ran our shul (another name for synagogue, literally ‘house of books’) was very smart. He rented the flat below the synagogue to a gentile who had a son in the SS. When anti-Semitic attacks came, this gentile son always made sure guards were protecting the flat, and therefore the shul above it. If they wanted to destroy the shul, they would have to destroy this man’s home too.
False papers were prepared for me, and with the help of a family friend I was enrolled at Jeter und Shearer, a mechanical engineering college in Tuttlingen, far to the south of Leipzig.
I was enrolled under the assumed name of Walter Schleif, a gentile German orphan who had less to fear from Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor. Walter Schleif was the identity of a real German boy who had vanished. Most likely, his family had quietly left Germany when the Nazis began to rise. My father obtained his identity cards and was able to modify them into forgeries that were convincing enough to fool the government. German identity cards at the time had tiny photos embedded in the paper which could only be seen with a special infrared light. The forgery had to be very well done,
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Writing letters was not safe, and to telephone I had to visit the phone in a department store basement, taking a long and complicated route to make sure I wasn’t followed.
Germany was at the forefront of a technological and industrial revolution that promised to make quality of life better for millions of people, and I was on the very cutting edge.
I arrived home and found the house dark and locked up. My family had vanished. I wasn’t to know that they had gone into hiding, believing that I was safe and far away.
Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting.
What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies.
I had no idea what had become of my parents – had they escaped from Leipzig before the Nazis came? Had they found safety with a friend or relative? Or had the Nazis come for them? Had they been imprisoned elsewhere in Germany? I just didn’t know, and my fear and worry kept me prisoner just as effectively as guards.
We were a nation that prized the rule of law above all else, a nation where people did not litter because of the inconvenience it caused to have messy streets. You could be fined 200 marks for throwing a cigarette butt out your car window.
Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of unified Germany, once warned the world to watch out for the German people. With a good leader, they were the greatest nation on Earth. With a bad leader, they were monsters. For the guards who persecuted us, discipline was more important than common sense.
The Germans made a religion of logic, and it turned them into murderers.
The Third Reich was preparing for Der totale Krieg, total war against the world. In total war, there was no difference between soldier and civilian, guilty and innocent, military and industry. German society was being entirely reorganised to make weapons of war, so anyone who had any expertise in machinery or manufacture was a potential asset to the war effort.
The Jews had become the scapegoat, as they had been time and time again over the centuries, but the hunger for money and productivity in the Third Reich still overpowered the insanity of pure hatred. We were in prison, but if the German state could make money out of us, then we were still useful to them.
After Kristallnacht, he and my family had returned to Leipzig, and had been quietly waiting for times to get better. Although they wanted to flee Germany, they would not leave me behind.
We were going to escape the country – this might be our one chance. My mother and sister, still in Leipzig, would follow and we would all reunite in Belgium.
The smuggler had promised to take us into Belgium, but instead took us to the Netherlands, where we gathered in the dark with seven other refugees on the side of a road. The roads of the day were the envy of Europe – wide, well-built, and elevated a metre and a half above a drainage ditch that ran alongside.
After that, legally, we would be in Belgium where the Nazi regime had no power to capture us. Many of the Jews who had fled to the Netherlands were subsequently returned to Germany, while Belgium was accepting more refugees trying to escape Germany and the worsening persecution.
He had to make a split-second decision – turn back to the Netherlands and possible capture or race for Belgium and endanger those of us who had escaped. He made the brave choice to turn, and disappeared back into the Netherlands.
He was under custody on a train back to the camps when he broke free, pulled the emergency brake to stop the train and escaped. That night, he was able to successfully cross the border and we were reunited at the hotel.
When we called to talk to them, the Gestapo answered the phone. They told me that if I didn’t come back right away, they would kill my mother.
I asked if I could speak to her for one minute, and the second she was on the phone, she cried out, ‘Don’t come back! It’s a trap! They’ll kill you!’ And the line went dead.
My father forbade me, and we fought bitterly about it. He was convinced that if I handed myself over, I would soon be dead.
Mum was in gaol for three months before she finally managed to negotiate the release of her and my sister. The minute she got out, she took my sister on the train to Aachen, on the border with Belgium, where they met the people smuggler who had got my father and me over the border. We were all to be reunited in Brussels.
I made an application to the Belgium government, pleading my case. ‘I don’t know why you are putting me in a camp because I’m German. I’m not with the Nazis, I’ve never collaborated with the Nazis, but I ask your permission to perfect my French. I’m willing to teach the young people of your country mechanical engineering.’ They accepted and gave me an identity card which allowed me to take the train every day to Ghent, a beautiful old city in the Flemish region of Belgium, about 20 kilometres away from the camp, which meant I needed special permission to visit.
We stayed there almost a year – until 10 May 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium and it became unsafe for the refugees to be there. Among the prisoners were a number of political refugees who had been high-ranking German politicians opposing the rise to power of the Nazi party. After the fall of the Third Reich, they had planned to return and rebuild the shattered remains of German democracy.
He was a very calm and inspiring leader, and even though he was a political exile, he had an inextinguishable hope that he would one day return to Germany and help to restore sanity. I thought to myself, I will follow this man, whatever happens. He is a survivor. Plans were made to evacuate us to Britain.
Unfortunately for us, the Belgian official in charge of the evacuation was a collaborator and wanted us to fall into the hands of the Nazis.
I couldn’t do it; I just couldn’t bring myself to take this poor boy’s clothes.
The Nazis held power everywhere in France now, with collaborators working hand-in-glove with the occupying forces.
I was sent to a concentration camp called Gurs near Pau, in southwest France. It was very basic, very primitive. It had been built in a rush in 1936 for the Spanish people escaping the Spanish civil war.
Hitler was increasingly obsessed with Jews in Europe, particularly those who had escaped to territories that he had since invaded. Many of us were highly educated professionals, doctors, scientists – the people Hitler needed to advance science and industry in his state. And he wanted us back. The collaborator Head of State of Vichy France, Philippe Pétain, wanted to free skilled French prisoners of war, and the foreign Jews across France were his bargaining chip.
I knew from my training that the engineer on every French train station had a small toolkit with a screwdriver and a shifting spanner.
He was a police commissioner in Brussels, and because of his connections in law enforcement and because my father trusted him, he was part of our contingency plan.
I learned that my parents had left the nice apartment and gone into hiding outside of Brussels.
They’d found a hiding place in the attic of Mr Toher, a very old gentleman, in his late nineties, who ran a boarding house. He was a kindly Catholic man and had no idea about the state of the world. He was too old to get out much and didn’t understand it was illegal to harbour Jews in his attic. I don’t think he even knew what a Jew was.
For two months, my two aunts, my mother’s sisters, lived with us. They were safe for a while, but one day they went back to our old apartment in Brussels to check the mail, and the Gestapo were waiting. We never saw them again.
It was impossible to buy food without stamps, and impossible to get stamps without Belgian citizenship.
I visited more than a hundred shops and businesses looking for someone who would buy the cigarettes, and I was lucky enough to meet a kind woman who ran a restaurant, Mrs Victoire Cornand, who agreed to sell the cigarettes for me and buy essentials.
Sometimes now, when I am lying in bed at night, I look back and think that this was the best time of my life. I cherished this time with my whole family together in that attic. It was cramped and sometimes uncomfortable, and I was working my fingers to the bone just to subsist, but we were together. This was the life I had dreamed of all those lonely days while I was living my secret life as Walter Schleif, and then in Buchenwald. As a frightened, lonely young man, this was all I ever wanted. And for a few wonderful months, this dream came true.
The Germans were horribly efficient in their methods, and made sure that every train was at maximum capacity of 1500 people, ten carriages each with 150 people on board.
I could not believe there were so many ways a person could be arrested: a Jew, a German, a vagrant!
From his pockets – to this day, I have no idea where he found them – he produced a little collapsible cup and a Swiss army knife. Using the knife, he cut up a sheet of paper into 150 little squares. He explained a system of rationing.
