The author was interviewed by Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler in Berlin.

He reports on antisemitismin a Berlin school in 1933. Forced labour for boys under sixteen: sixty hours a week for about 25 Pfennig an hour. In order to avoid impending deportation to Poland, at the end of 1942 (p.1,4), he went to live with a “Mischling” (p.1-3), now his brother-in-law, who was already hiding his father and sister as well.

Non-Jews helping Jews, among them Dr. George Grosscurth, Robert Koch-Krankenhaus, who was later executed for his work with a Resistance Group, liquidated, in the Autumn 1943 (p.2,4). Frightened, the three illegal guests left their hiding place which was bombed out, soon afterwards. Bombenscheine (p.2, 4). The author's sister went with her fiancé into hiding at Vienna, the other two found a little room in Karow near Bernau (p.2-3) under false pretenses and through a forged document. Arrested by the Wehrmacht, the author and his father were taken to the Jewish Sammellager Schulstrasse; ill-treatment through Gestapo (p.3-5). Deportation via Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen (p.3). In February 1945, the author was separated from his father and never saw him again. Transports to Neubrandenburg, Ravensbruck, a small camp near Ludwigslust (p.3-4). Rote Kapelle resistance group (p.4). Volksdeutsche SS (p.3-4).

Mrs Hirsch is the daughter of Christian parents. Her mother, Mrs Meyer, née Kerl, managed a large boarding-house in Teplitz, where Mrs Hirsch spent her youth until she married Egon Hirsch, a Jewish insurance agent for the “Viktoria“ company. The couple lived first in Bodenbach, then in Karlsbad.

When Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, they fled to Prague. When Prague was taken by the Germans Mrs Hirsch prepared for their emigration. She succeeded in getting an exit permit for Mr Hirsch which enabled him to go to England. She, as a Christian, was not allowed to leave the country, and her marriage was dissolved on Gestapo orders. With labour conscription in Czechoslovakia, she took various jobs where she could be helpful to Jews, or where she could sabotage the work of the Germans. She also sheltered a Jewish friend. With a doctor’s certificate that she was suffering from TB she managed to get time off for holidays in the mountains, but when she finally joined her mother in Teplitz, she had to attend a doctor who treated her alleged disease with painful injections.

After the end of the war, Russians occupied Teplitz, and for fear of Russian acts of violence, the women took German prisoners of war into their house, but the constant nervous strain and fear of deportation drove the mother to suicide.

In 1946 Mrs Hirsch could join her husband in England, and their marriage was legalised again. However, the 7 years of separation had estranged them, and after 3 years they got a divorce. After the usual type of work for refugees, Mrs Hirsch finally obtained work with the European service of the BBC. She lost all her possessions in Teplitz-Schönau.

Mrs Sternberg-Sitte is a Christian and emigrated to Amsterdam in 1933 with Mr Sternberg-Sitte, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin. The Nuremberg laws prohibited a legal marriage. At first the couple lived precariously, he as a taxi-driver, she as a dressmaker. Later, Mr Sternberg-Sitte had an agency for groceries. After the German invasion, Mr Sternberg-Sitte ostensibly left their flat and lived illegally as an “onderduiker”. In September 1942 they were denounced and arrested and taken to the Amsteveensche Weg prison. Mr Sternberg-Sitte was sent to Amersfort camp and later gassed in Auschwitz (p.2). Mrs Sternberg-Sitte remained in prison until 1943. Conditions there were tolerable, although the cells were badly overcrowded. She was then put on a transport of prisoners which stopped at the prisons of Scheveningen, Cleve, Utrecht, Düsseldorf, Hannover and Berlin, collecting prisoners of all types and nationalities, finally to end in Ravensbrück. There were approximately 50,000 prisoners in Ravensbrück, both political and criminal.

The account goes into the details of the appalling conditions there, describing the organisation in the various blocks (p.4), the insufficient food and clothing (p.5), the brutal treatment under the command of supervisor Binz ( p.5) and the atrocities and penalties for the least lapse (p.5-7). There were three brothels in the camp (p.7-8) whose inmates had preferential treatment, but if they became ill they were gassed. Pregnant women had to submit to abortions, and if a child was born, the prisoners killed it and considered this an act of humanity. Of two smaller camps nearby, one was turned into an extermination camp, and of the 4,000 women sent there only 30 survived (p.8).

The women were allocated to various “commandos“ and Mrs Sternberg-Sitte got into the group working for Siemens. This entailed various privileges e.g. an extra ration of bread - “Siemensbrot”- and housing in special blocks (p.7). In March 1945 Siemens no longer had work for the prisoners, and they returned to the general camp. In April 1945 the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg prisoners had to report to the “Volkssturm”, the SS having disappeared, and were told by some Swedes arriving at the camp that they were free. When lorries arrived to fetch them, they took other prisoners as well, and Mrs Sternberg-Sitte was one of them. They were first taken to the International Red Cross centre in Lübeck and from there on a hazardous journey (p.10) with frequent air attacks and breakdowns via Bremen, Kiel and Hamburg to Flensburg, and after a short stop at the Danish frontier town of Padborg they went to Malmö in Sweden. From here Mrs Sternberg-Sitte was later repatriated to Holland.

Mrs Ehrenberg lived with her first husband, an engineer holding a French diploma, Schlama Goldstein, and their little daughter (born 1938) in comfortable circumstances at Lodz, Poland (p.1, 10, 11, 13). Together with innumerable others, they fled from the approaching Germans in September 1933. The situation on the main road proved to be chaotic; she went back to Lodz through burning villages, under the fire of German planes shooting recklessly down at the fleeing people (p.1). Terror at Rawa-Mazowiezka; hostages (p.2); a pastor (Volksdeutscher) ordered the murdering to be stopped. After the occupation of Warsaw, the author's husband and brother returned to Lodz, too, but as the oppression was getting worse, fled to Bialystok (p.3-9), a Polish town, belonging to Russia at the time. When, in February 1940, the author's family had to move into the Ghetto Lodz she pretended to be a Polish Aryan and tried to join her husband with her little child (who soon died there) at Bialystok, occupied by the German troops since June 1941. Although she enjoyed the help of several people, the dangers of her illegal life finally proved too much for her nerves, and she went to live in the Ghetto, in August 1943. Dreams coming true (p.5-6, 9-10, 12). In view of the pending liquidation, her husband insisted that she left the Ghetto, and she used her Aryan document to get released; as she was leaving, the SS-officer who was guilty of the murder and [illegible]JÄ misery of innumerable human beings, gave her a kitten to save its life (p.6).

She then made several - interesting - attempts to rescue her husband (p.7), but could not save him from the worst. At last she was denounced by an informer, Czeslaw Bielilo (p.7, 13) and imprisoned at Bialystok, as, since November 1943, Jews who had escaped from the Ghetto were no longer shot dead on the spot, where they were discovered, but had to be taken to an annihilation camp.

Horrible transport to KZ Stutthof near Danzig. Selected and sent to Auschwitz (p.9-11). There she was an eye-witness of all kind of horrors and atrocities. With the aid of a Polish detainee, she would succeed to hide and rescue Jewish girls from the selections (p.11).

In October 1944, transfer to Bergen-Belsen (p.12-13). Typhoid. She would see Irma Gresse repeatedly but never saw her ill-treating a detainee (p.12). Liberation, on 15 April 1945. Visit to Lodz; of her large family only one aunt had survived.

At Konstanz, Bodensee (p.13), she made the acquaintance of Mr Hajim Ehrenberg, a survivor of Treblinka, whose wife and children had perished. She got married to him, in December 1946, and with the help of the Joint, they emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1949, where they are both working successfully, after a son was born to them, in 1950. (p.13,14).