An account in the first person of the author and her family’s experiences during the last year of war in Hungary. In March 1944, on arrival of German troops to occupy Hungary, the persecution of Jews intensified. Her husband was called up for forced labour and the author and her child, aged four, were left alone. In October 1944, when the Fascists (Arrow-Cross Movement) took over the government, the author made use of false papers (p.4), procured in the preceding February (p.1), and for some weeks lived as “Aryan” refugee. Later she and her husband procured Swedish Schutzpaesse's (p. 8) and lived with other Jews in the so-called Swedish Schutzhaus (p.8) until the Russians conquered this part of the city in January 1945. A vivid account of experiences, particularly of the period when the author lived an “illegal” life.

The authoress had to leave school prematurely in 1934 and became an apprentice in the tailoring trade. However, in 1937 she was, as a Jewess, not admitted to the final examination. Her parents then obtained visa for themselves and her for Cuba. Unfortunately, all the Cuban visas were cancelled, and the boat returned from Antwerp to Hamburg. The parents started to produce uniforms. Their 15 year-old daughter was the first to be transported East, the parents followed in February 1943 when they were taken to Auschwitz. These three perished.

The authoress then married the tailor Martin Deutschkron. She had to do compulsory work at Siemens in Berlin suburbs. When, at the end of January 1943, the Gestapo was about to arrest the couple, both decided to “disappear” and live illegally. Mrs Deutschkron nursed for six months a sick womanwhile Mr Deutschkron managed to obtain a job with a Hungarian as a tailor, he had to sleep on the ironing board. Later, Mrs Deutschkron worked there also. Mr Deutschkron possessed the military papers of a man who had died which bore all the necessary rubber stamps.

A Jew, named Ralf Isaaksohn, denounced the illegal occupation of the Deutschkron couple to the Gestapo. His girlfriend, Stella Kübler-Goldstein tried to trace them after they had left their jobs at the tailor Gomber. They first spent their nights in a shed in Borkheide, then in a house at Berlin Lützowplatz which was bombed. The same happened to a house in Grunewald where they for a time looked after the central heating.

For several months they were again able to do some tailoring and to barter textile articles for food. But there too they became suspect and had to move about constantly until in 1945 the Russians came and appointed Mr Deutschkron guardsman. When, however, for a short time the Germans returned, Mr Deutschkron was to be shot as a traitor. The couple, under renewed menace of death, escaped. Eventually, the Russians liberated them.

The authoress, née Lasocka, was the wife of the well-to-do manufacturer Paul Rosenfeld in Lodz (p.1-3, 12). He was arrested at the very beginning of the War, and she never saw him again. The Germans forced her to deliver to them all valuables she had deposited in a safe at her bank. Two days after the Germans had looted and ill-treated her mother, she died of her wounds (p.1).

A Jewish informer called Strassberg lured the authoress to Warsaw; making believe that he would help her husband, he got more and more money out of her (p.2-3).

The report describes life in the Ghetto (p.3-4). The helpful Christian maid (p.1, 3-5, 8, 11). Every morning, there were lying in the streets hundreds of bodies, either slain by the Germans or victims of the starvation. Escape (p.4).

Illegal life; everything was especially difficult and expensive because of the author's little daughter. An illegal group at the “Polish hotel” (Jewish agents among them) said to procure foreign documents for emigration. The price was enormous, about £1000 nonetheless she paid for her brother-in-law and his son but they were not heard of anymore (p.5).

Moving from one Polish family to the other, always paying highly for most unpleasant conditions, every moment in danger of being discovered. Arrested by police, escape after paying ransom twice (p.5-6).

The Polish riot, 1944 (p.8). The authoress with her child and her mother-in-law (who has been with her nearly all the time until her death in London) had to flee from the Germans. Non-Jews helping Jews: a railway-officer helped them to escape from the moving train near Ursus; another one put them up, his daughter and a girl in the street bore witness, in order to get a necessary document from a kindly clergyman (p.10). When finally every stranger had to leave, the authoress won the assistance of a high German officer (who did not recognise them to be Jews); he put a van and three Germans in uniform at her disposal to take them to a place near Lowicz, where her former maid was living. Because of this escort who insisted that the Mayor procured lodgings for them, too, they had to take to flight again, when the Russians approached. They went back to Lodz and their old flat.

In July 1946 they came to London after getting the necessary documents through an American relative who had learned from the radio, that they had survived. While they were waiting for the relative's arrival in London, the authoress became engaged to her present husband and decided to stay in England for good.

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).

Miss X. was living with her Aryan mother and Nazi stepfather in Breslau; had, on the whole, no unpleasant personal experiences. School (1941 last year of Abiturium for “Non-Aryans”). “Pflichtjahr” (instead of six months' Labour Service). Ration cards had to be fetched from a special centre for every household with a non-Aryan, which was compromising. She had to leave a position as a shop assistant in a music shop because it would bring her into contact with the general public.

In forced labour camp: Organisation Todt; Unternehmen Berthold; unpleasant circumstances; the author states cynical outlook on sexual behavior. She had a chance of marrying an Aryan Czech, i.e. “a man of inferior nationality” since her father had not received a University education; thus there was deemed to be little risk of her transmitting “Jewish intelligence” to her children.

Miss X. is now living in London with her Jewish father.

Correspondence between various offices of the Nazi Party and the Bund Deutscher Maedchen in Cologne about whether the children of a half-Jewish woman and an Aryan (“Deutsch-bluetigen”) are members of the BDM. The Gauleitung Cologne demands that the “quarter-Jews” are to be expelled from the BDM. In conclusion, the Rassenpolitische Amt of the NSDAP Cologne states that the Mischlinge concerned are not registered as members of the Hitler Youth or BDM.

Original title: Correspondence from the Reich Youth Leadership regarding Herbert Kleindick

Recorded by:

Original form and contents:

Correspondence between NSDAP offices - Personnel Department, Reich Youth Leadership; offices of the Personnel Dept., NSDAP, Mittelrhein (11) District.

Two sons of Fritz Emil Schueler, of Bad Godesberg, were members of the Hitler Youth. When it was alleged that they were not of “Pure Aryan blood” the Personnel Inspectorate (Überwachungsstelle) started an investigation, resulting in their being struck of the Hitler Youth membership lists.

Unfortunately the reports mention the names of neither persons nor places.

Record of an interview with Mr Singer, a Polish citizen resident in Duisburg, Germany, Jewish, who emigrated illegally to Holland in December 1938. His Aryan wife and his small daughter followed him in 1939. Mr. Singer was interned at Hook van Holland, his wife and child remained free until April 1940, when all three were sent to Westerbork, then still under Dutch administration. When the Germans took over the camp on 13 July 1942, Mischlinge and partners of mixed marriages were released, and the Singers returned to Amsterdam. The rest of the report describes the hardships of life in Holland under German occupation.

The document reads like a poetic short-story. During a walk along the river in the Berlin of 1945, the writer first saw Mr Bender and his wife on board of their barge and noticed a little dog playing at their feet. Something about the sudden outcry of the woman and the tender care of the old man aroused her interest, and after they had met several times along the river, they got into a conversation in the course of which Mr Bender told his sad story. He was the son of a small Jewish trademan and became a musician. He married Franziska, the Christian daughter of a bargee. They had a son, Philipp, who married a Jewess. With their granddaughter, their happiness was complete. When the child was 12 years old, they gave her a little dog. That was the time of the first anti-Jewish hostilities. When the situation worsened, and Jews were eliminated from the economy, the daughter-in-law became shy and misanthropic, and the child grew very attached to her grandmother. The old woman, therefore, never recovered from the shock to find the girl and her Jewish mother taken away, when they returned home one day in 1943. In spite of innumerable petitions, they never heard from them again. From that day on, the old woman is haunted, and when she cannot find rest at nights and walks about, “the little dog barks”.

The account is based on the personal memories of the recorder who was a life-long friend of Mrs Perutz's and a frequent guest in her boarding-house. Mrs Perutz was the child of Christian parents; her mother owned a large boarding house in Teplitz-Schonau, frequented equally by Jews and Christians. There was, however, a predominance of Jews, and most of her social connections were Jewish. Nevertheless, she married a Christian naval officer, Captain Meyer, but the marriage was unhappy and quickly dissolved. On the birth of her child in 1905, she returned to her mother's in Teplitz and eventually married for the second time the banker Perutz in 1922. He was a baptized Jew and died in 1928. With the event of Hitler, most of Mrs Perutz's Jewish friends emigrated and her Christian friends shunned her. She was completely isolated but for her daughter whose Jewish husband had emigrated to England. Her nervous depression was further accentuated when at the end of the war Russians occupied Teplitz, and when in addition she was threatened with deportation, she committed suicide in 1945.