“Have your husband and son report tomorrow morning to the deportee collection center on Grosse Hamburger Street!” the Gestapo officer ordered my mother. She had accompanied friends who had received their deportation orders to the collection center in the Levetzow Street synagogue, where the officer questioned her, wanting to know why she was concerned about “those Jews.”
In April 1945, the demolition crew to which my father and I belonged was working near an SS facility when a line of military trucks moved slowly down the street, pushed—we hardly could believe our eyes—by a group of SS men. It was an exhilarating sight, pure unalloyed schadenfreude.
On the morning of February 27, 1943, a Saturday, we wearily stood at our workbenches turning out parts for some air-force equipment, my high school classmate and close friend, Gert, working not far from me. Suddenly the door opened and an SS officer stepped into the room. “Pay attention,” he called out. “Drop whatever you are doing and leave by the main entrance.” We were stunned.
Berlin fall 1944, the Americans and British are approaching the Rhine, and the Russians are on German soil. Our group of Jewish husbands and sons of mixed marriages was doing its usual work, demolishing ruins and cleaning up after air raids, when suddenly we were “detached to special duty.”
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