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David Bayer

“When I came back to our house there was Germans, in our house, robbing us, taking everything that they can. German officers and German soldiers, whatever they could. A lot of shoes, a lot of leather, they were taking whatever they wanted. We came in, the Germans asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ We said, ‘We live here, this is my house.’ They were laughing and making fun of us. We were scared, me, my mother, my brother, my two sisters, my father. My father was 40 years old then. And there was a German that asked my father, ‘Why do you, why do you, nobody likes the Jews. Why are you so afraid? Why nobody likes the Jews?’ Because, my father told him, ‘Because we don’t hit back.’ He made a gesture with his fist, I was scared I thought my father was going to hit him but he just made it with his fist. So every German laughed and they left.”
(postwar testimony)

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Interview — Describes leaving Germany to escape Nazi persecution [2001 interview].

Transcript:

Yes, I do want to get back to where I did learn silence. After being locked up for nine months and hearing that we were going to go to live in Africa, my mother was a little nervous about my not ever having seen a black person. So she went to the library, I remember very clearly, I don't know where she got the books, it must have been a library, and she got books with stories about African people. Helped a little bit, kind of informed me a little bit, and then she started prodding me and teaching me about silence. That we were going to go on a train. We were going to leave Germany. That if I called attention to us, we could be thrown off the train, and that I was to be quiet, and that it was so serious that even if I had to go to the bathroom, that could not become a problem. I could not speak, I could not call attention to myself, I could not fight with my sister, I could not ask for a drink of water. I just had to sit in that compartment and be quiet until we were out of Germany, and then she would let me know. The minute we pass out of Germany, she would let me know. It was terribly dangerous. My sick grandmother, you know you've all probably, if you haven’t studied the Holocaust, you will, Hitler had no use for people who were not, quote, normal. They used euthanasia early on in Germany with sick people or retarded people, and my grandmother was very sick, she couldn’t walk anymore. And we had to get her on that train. A very very brave man who himself had just got out of Dachau came to visit us and carried my grandmother into the car, drove her to the train station, and carried her into the train, without being stopped. It was a tremendous, tremendous difficulty. My grandparents, my maternal grandparents never knew their sons were in prison in Holland, my mother never told them. And they were old. My grandfather was 79, my grandmother was 70. And my grandmother was leaving all these myriads of people behind. All her brothers and sisters, just, I mean today, it's just, she went. She went. And we got on the train and we were quiet, and the ladies, the men weren't there, the women on the train - two uncles stayed behind, they came later.

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