SINCE WORLD WAR II, many books have been written about the Holocaust. This book is about my own experiences before, during, and, to a lesser extent, after that period.
I decided to record these events primarily because I want my children to know what happened to me before I arrived in America. When they were young, they asked me to tell them about my life in Germany, but the demands of establishing a new business and my feeling that they would be unable to comprehend the horror of the Holocaust prevented me from doing so. I told them that I would answer all their questions when they were older.
Now I feel differently. I want them to know as much as I can transmit, as much as I can remember about myself and about my mother and father, their parents and families. Time is rushing by, and if I don’t attend to the task of writing now, I may not be able to do so later.
Then there are my grandchildren, who should know of the trials of those who came before them. It is my hope that my sons and daughters will pass my story on to their children and they to their children, so that knowledge of the Holocaust will become a legacy binding the generations together, never to be forgotten.
In 1933, Hitler took power and became Supreme Ruler and Dictator of Germany. Berlin had a Jewish population of around 165,000. When World War II ended in 1945, about fourteen hundred Jewish Berliners had stayed alive by hiding out in the city, and about three thousand more had survived the concentration camps. Fewer than five thousand of Berlin’s Jews were left to inform the world of what they had experienced. I am one of them.
It is with a profound sense of obligation that I relate to you my memories of life on the run in Nazi Berlin.