I always had this feeling that my father would be able to protect me, protect us. When you're a child, you feel your parents are almighty. But I realized then that your parents cannot. There always was this fear. There was this fear when we started going to school that we would get beaten up.

I was run over by a bicycle in 1933 when I was only four years old. I was walking at the edge of the park with my parents and a Hitler Youth boy on a bicycle drove right into me and drove over my knee, on purpose of course. He knocked me over, but luckily nothing was broken so my parents didn't say anything. They didn't go to the police to complain because if you went to the police and complained it only meant that you would be beaten up. The police wouldn't do anything about it anyway.


I had that feeling right along. I had a real disdain for them. I did not feel that I was less important. I didn't feel that I was inferior. I felt that I had a superior morality. I mean I didn't express it in such terms at the time. But I felt, "Look at these people. Look what they're doing."

My parents would send me to go to the bakery in the morning, because a child would not be thrown out or whatever, and every so often, as long as we were not wearing the star, my mother was able to stand in the line and get some potatoes. Also my father had some pocketbooks left from his business-he manufactured pocketbooks and belts-and he was able to trade them for some food.

Of course we were afraid. We always wanted to be inconspicuous. We didn't want to awaken anything or anyone. In the house where we lived, there were about ten or so tenants. They were not Jewish people. Some were quite friendly, but they stopped talking to us after awhile.

Also I remember Streicher's newspaper Der Stürmer that was everywhere. My father didn't buy it obviously. I saw it on newsstands, on the kiosks, but I didn't pay attention. What I remember very vividly is Hitler's speeches almost every Sunday morning, because everybody had their windows open and I guess they wanted to show how patriotic they were. He screeched away like "Oooh, oooh" you know how he speaks when you see the newsreels of it. I remember every Sunday morning the church bells going on one side and him just screaming on the other side. It was very strange. When I came here Harry Truman was running for president and I saw him on television and in the movies and I couldn't believe that here was a man running for a political office and talking calmly. He didn't pound on the table, didn't pound on the chairs, and he behaved himself like a human being. I had, thought the only way you could conduct a political anything was to scream and shout and pound tables and all that.

Also what I saw a lot were these posters that were advertising the BDM [League of German Girls] and the Hitler Youth. They had these cute little girls with these blond pigtails and a couple of freckles on their noses and that was the ideal German girl. And they had these cute boys for the Hitler Youth. They were plastered all over.

My parents told me not to play with non-Jewish children because kids will fight over a toy, or whatever, and the parents will get involved and a Jewish parent could not win out against a non-Jewish parent. For example, I was sitting one Sunday morning on the stoop in front of our house and a little girl walked up. This had to be in 1934 or the beginning of 1935. I was five years old and she was maybe older. The little girl walked up to me and said that she wanted to play with me and I said, "No, I can't play with you because you're not Jewish." I do, though, remember playing with one Jewish girl, and we stayed friends. In 1942, she lived diagonally across the street from us. She was always hanging out at my house and I was always at her house and there were other friends there at times. In the summer of 1942, early summer, she was taken away. I saw her from our apartment window in a group of Jews that was being marched to one of the railroad stations. There were about maybe fifty people. They were able to take with them two weeks' supply of clothing and some food. I saw her walking through the street, a forlorn little girl, and that was the last I saw of her.

My brother said that a few days after Kristallnacht, my father and he went downtown to see the different stores that had been destroyed and there were Germans standing around and they looked glum and they were shaking their heads as if they couldn't believe that such a thing was possible. People tell me that some Germans hid Jews. I didn't know of anyone of course. During the war it seemed that, yes, they were indifferent. But, if given a chance, they would be against us. As I said, my brother saw this, but I didn't see it. He told me about it, but I never perceived them as friends. I considered them all as enemies. Some would beat up on Jews and were worse than others.

The first thing they did was shave our hair, take our clothes off, and put the tattoo on with the number. One of the women on our transport was a nurse and we saw someone being carried on a very primitive sort of litter and her hands were dangling. She obviously was dead. I had never seen this before, and I turned to this nurse and she said, "Oh, she's probably just sick." They still wanted to protect us as children. But, of course, once we got into the camp, we saw this every morning - ten people, at least ten, dead, being dragged out and dying and all this...

One of the first things we did was dig ditches. They were little moats outside the barracks, about three feet deep where the wastewater ran. Next to it there were roads and we were digging ditches and they told us to smoothen the road. And there was this humongous road grader, but it wasn't motorized. They filled that with water, and they had hundreds of prisoners pushing it so that the roads would get smooth. That, together with the two hundred or so calories that they gave us in Auschwitz, was designed to break our spirit and to break us right away down into a state of malnutrition.

That whole summer the crematorium was going day and night. During the day it was all smoke and at night you could see flames coming up. You could really see it. You could see it from miles away. In Birkenau I stayed with my mother the whole time in a big barracks, sleeping on boards with three pieces of straw or whatever that were infested with lice and fleas. I wouldn't be alive if not for my mother. The crematorium was going and the flames were coming out. At night you would see it red. During the day it was black because of the smoke. There were little pieces, chips of bone, flying all over the place.

At one time I said that there were two Germanys and too bad there weren't a hundred of them, broken up into little pieces. That's how I felt. I have been back in Frankfurt, I think three times, since we left in 1947. When I went to Frankfurt, I went back because I wanted to look at the cemeteries, at my grandparents' graves. I had my grandfather's stone restored, because in 1936, when he died, my father wasn't able to get him a granite stone and it was pressed sand and it washed away. I also went to my grandmother's grave a few times. I stood in front of my best friend's house. I stand there and I'm looking for her with her grandmother coming out with her apron and a tray of cookies and begging me to come into the house and have a cup of coffee with her. So when I go to Germany I'm looking at the people walking by and I'm saying, "Oh, these are all the people that turned from these beautiful posters, these blond, blue-eyed posters. They're turning into these old decrepit people. They're nothing. They're not super people like they wanted us to believe. They're really just humans like anybody else."

When I came back to Frankfurt in 1945, it was toward the winter and the houses were all ruined. There were just houses standing there with the gates as sort of an abstract thing sitting on top of the rubble, and I was thinking to myself, "I'm sure there must be dead people under there from when they were bombed." I have not forgiven myself for this feeling because I said to myself, "Oh my gosh. These poor people buried under there-burned by the bombs and killed by the bombs." Why should I feel sorry for the Germans when I had all these friends that they killed? They brought this all on themselves. My friends never did anything to provoke this.