During the so-called Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, a few months after I landed in Sweden, the Nazis wrecked all the Jewish stores, plundered them, and burned down the synagogues. All the Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. My father landed in Dachau. He rarely talked about what he experienced there. But he did describe how he and his fellow prisoners were forced to remove a pile of rocks by hand day after day. When they had finished doing that, they were told to put the rocks back again where they came from. All the while SS guards yelled and beat them. The point was to degrade the men and make them understand the hopelessness of their situation. They didn’t know how long they would be held. Or how long they would have to put up with this meaningless but at the same time strenuous work, which often had to be done in the cold. Their clothes were not meant for such weather. Through this sadistic treatment the guards tried to break down the prisoners’ self-respect and turn them into slaves.
My mother was a woman of action and immediately began to investigate the possibilities of getting my father, my uncle, and my prospective brother-in-law out. It turned out that at that time you could get out of a concentration camp by immediately leaving Germany. But the problem was that you normally needed a visa to emigrate to a foreign country. Most countries, among them Sweden, usually didn’t want any Jewish refugees or, like the United States, had long waiting lists. My mother managed to figure out that the English crown colony of Trinidad was one of the few places where you didn’t need a visa to get in. A few times a month a boat sailed from Bremerhaven to Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. Somehow she managed to buy some boat tickets and then traveled to Dachau, where she went to the commander and demanded that they be let out since they had emigration documents. About three months had then passed. My father, uncle, and brother-in-law and several of his male relatives were then allowed to leave the camp on one condition: they had to travel to Bremerhaven within a couple of days and take nothing with them except the most necessary clothes and ten marks each. My mother stayed behind in Germany, partly in order to take care of our belongings, which she was going to pack up and if possible send to Trinidad, but more importantly in order to take care of her old parents. My grandfather lay seriously ill in a hospital. She put my grandmother in a Jewish Home for the Aged.
In the fall of 1939 my family had splintered: I was in Sweden, my sister in the United States, my father in Trinidad, and my mother was still in Germany. She still had not received permission to travel to Trinidad. The beginning of the war was approaching, and my father sent letters insisting that she join him. At the same time I tried in vain to get permission for her to come to Sweden if the trip to Trinidad proved to be impossible. We constantly wrote and called each other. At the end of April, 1939, she received permission to go to Trinidad and managed to get a boat ticket. In the last letter from Germany she wrote how sad she was that we were separated from each other by such great distances. She hoped that we would soon see each other again.
When she took her farewell from her father, he tried to hold onto her. Two days after she left, he died. After the war broke out and France quickly capitulated, my grandmother, who was well over eighty, was sent along with other southern German Jews in cattle cars to the concentration camp in Gurs in southern France. Previously it had been used to quarter soldiers from the Republican Army, who had fled to France after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. After three days in the jam-packed cattle cars without water or food, my grandmother was dead on arrival. A relative, a nephew who managed to escape from the camp in Gurs and travel via Portugal to the United States, had heard about this from his mother, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. The women had tried to stick together for the whole trip. It must have been a nightmare.
Translated by Lena Karlström and Peter Stenberg.