I had been in a Jewish school from the very first day in school in 1928. We were liberal Jews; we were not Orthodox. I had neither sisters nor brothers; I was the only son. Germans looked at Jews in a sort of bad way. A Jew was always a Jew in Germany. I remember that even before 1933 when I went to my grandparents who lived in the country, that the general population when I came there knew I was Jewish and always made remarks. Especially children made the remarks to me. It was in such a way that I never walked alone on the streets, even in the little town where my grandparents lived. Children always gave me a hard time. They wouldn't hit me; they just annoyed me with words and yelled obscene things at me. But, at that time, I was too young to even fathom the whole idea. I didn't really get involved until I would say thirteen or fourteen. By that time I started realizing what really was going on, and my parents started to say that eventually we would all have to leave, except it was a couple of years more until we finally found our relatives here who gave us the necessary affidavit.

We never felt comfortable. At least I didn't. And then after November 10, 1938, nobody felt comfortable and we all had to leave. My entire family, except for my parents, perished. My parents were the only people of my family who managed to get out.

I remember when they (the Nazis) were having their big parades in the evening, their flags, their music, and torchlight parades at night. We all stayed in and we knew they were having parades. Nobody went outside. No one felt secure, no one. You didn't trust your next-door neighbor because you didn't know what they were going to do to you. Neighbors who formerly came to your house, and were neighborly and friendly, all of a sudden refrained from even saying hello to you. They acted as if they didn't know you. I can't say that they were really trying to do something to you, but they were afraid that if they would show you any kind of friendliness that they would have a problem. And yet, I would have to say that after the war, after everything was over, a friend of my father's and a friend of my wife's tried everything possible to get in touch with us, and they succeeded. They had to reestablish connections after the war. But during the Nazi regime, no one would have dared to do anything.

The owner of the building... had a cafe. Before 1933 we very often went downstairs into the cafe and had coffee and cake. But later on, even though they didn't throw us out, there was no feeling of friendship. Again, whether it was forced on them, we don't know. But we didn't go back, we didn't go into their cafe anymore.

I didn't feel ashamed to be a Jew, of course not. But it was very dangerous. I have always been conscious of it. I would never make a secret out of it. I have sometimes wondered how they could tell who I was. Especially in the city of Frankfurt with over half a million inhabitants, how could they tell who was Jewish? But people still found out.

I remember on November 10, 1938, at the Kristallnacht, that I didn't know anything about it that morning. Early in the morning I was walking down the street and two SA men came to me and stopped me. "Come with us," they said. I didn't know them; they didn't know me, but they must have known I was a Jew. I don't know how they knew, but they knew...

They lined them up and just said, "Stand there." Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. They didn't give us food or anything. We just stood there for the whole day. And I'm sure the others stood there longer. But by late evening or early evening, I don't remember the time, they called me and asked, "How old are you?" At that time in 1938, I was sixteen and I was able to get out and go home. And that was that...

I never got hit. At first when they combed the street, they took us to some sort of assembly point where they already had another twenty, thirty, or forty people. I don't remember exactly how many they marched there. It really wasn't that far away. While we walked there, and, of course, after the walk, all the people on the sidewalks started yelling at us-normal Germans, children and adults, and women also. There were no exceptions: man, woman, and child. They knew who we were because they walked us down as a group of forty or fifty people [and because those who marched us] wore uniforms, SA uniforms. The people just walking down the streets who saw us coming just let loose with insults. Maybe they were told that we were marching through the streets and that they should just yell at us. But I don't know, it could have been spontaneous. But who can tell?

My father was arrested a couple of days later and taken to Dachau. While he was away, I went to the American consulate in Stuttgart and checked out our papers and I was assured at that time that our number, our registration number, would be called in early 1939. With that information, and with the fact that my father was a Frontkdmpfer [frontline soldier] from World War I, I went to the police and gave them all the information, and they said that on that basis he would be released shortly. It still took a couple of weeks. I imagine that he was away for about four or five weeks and then he came home. While we were in ,Germany, my father never spoke about it. He never said a word. He said, "I'm not talking about it. It's forgotten now." But look, we were all glad. Once he came home, we made our entire efforts to get out, to get rid of our things, and to make sure that our relatives who lived in a small town in Warttemberg could take over our apartment. We left the furniture; we left everything for them to take over. We left it for them because they had nothing. They had smashed their furniture and what not. But that was a small town - everybody knew everyone. They moved in there as we moved out.