Of course, Uncle Hermann refused, because he loved his wife and furthermore both had read Hitlers 'Mein Kempf'. In spite of this fact they could not convince her parents to leave Germany when this was still possible.

A few years later when it was too late to leave, there was no chance for them to escape when the Nazi officials ordered Mr. and Mrs. Kohn to give up their house and to go to live in a home for aged people in the East. As they were no longer able to pay the sum of money that was demanded, their son-in-law paid it for them. My aunt and my uncle took her parents to the station. They did not know that it was a farewell forever, but later my aunt could not go to see anybody off at the station.

Due to what we know today, my aunt's parents died in the gas in one of the concentration camps in the East, immediately after their arrival

As I have mentioned before, Uncle Kurt had joined Hitler's party and had become a passionate Nazi. Two more brothers joined the NSDAP for patriotic reasons, one of them left the party again after Kristallnacht, the pogrom of 1938 when even the synagogues were set on fire.

At that moment my grandmother said: "When the state authorities burn down the houses of God, this will come to a bad end".

One more brother, besides Hermann, never joined the party, nor did my mother. She did not go to the regular meetings of the NS Frauenschaft either, an almost obligatory association for Nazi women.

My aunt arrived by train, she did not wear the yellow star. She was lucky not to be controlled and have to show her papers on the way. Nobody in the bakery knew she was Jewish, nor did anybody in my hometown because the family had moved there only a few years ago.

Everybody could understand that Aunt Ilse had left the big city just as many other inhabitants, because the German troops in the East gradually withdrew and the front line was coming closer.

This decision may sound very easy to you today, but in those days the risk was great and if my aunt's Jewish identity had been discovered, it would have been the end for all of us.

In January 1945 Aunt Ilse fell on the icy pavement near the bakery and broke her arm! Impossible to take her to hospital or to the family doctor where she would have had to show her papers. So my mother went to a doctor who had had to give up his practice because he was half Jewish. My mother knew she could trust him. They managed the medical treatment without arousing suspicion and my aunt had her arm in plaster.

On February 10th, 1945 the Russians took my hometown, our house was bombed, there was no chance of leaving the town. We had to stay there. After a short while parts of the inhabitants were driven eastwards by the Russians, on foot of course, with a few remaining possessions in a small rack-wagon.

Then somewhere in a tiny village my mother and many other women were caught by Russian soldiers and taken away as civilian prisoners of war to build runways for Russian planes.

Fortunately my aunt still had her arm in plaster and did not have to go. I could stay with her and my mother knew I would not be lost, even if she did not return. Thank God she came back after some weeks and after May 8" we were allowed to go back to my hometown.

There a friendly old couple, former customers in our bakery, offered us a safe room in their house where we could hide and where the women would not easily be discovered by any soldier.

My mother fell seriously ill, my aunt nursed her as well as she could and with some medicine Lutheran sisters, former customers, too, had organised somewhere, my mother gradually recovered. But she was still very weak, my aunt not much stronger, the old couple almost no longer able to feed us, the two women considered their situation desperate and rather hopeless. I can still see them kneeling together on the floor, my mother's hymn and prayer book before them on a small table praying to God to save them They have never been closer to each other than at that moment.

Then the general situation became safer and we could find a room of our own. In those days neither my aunt nor my mother had received any news about the fate of their husbands. Almost every day I was sent to the post office to ask for letters. In those days of uncertainty my aunt rather unexpectedly said to my mother she wished no German men would return home from war. This sentence deeply hurt and shocked my mother.

At the first sight it is incomprehensible, but I suppose her remark was a kind of signal, a cry for help. After all the humiliations my aunt had had to bear for years, her deep despair after the painful loss of her parents, the constant psychic tension she had had to live with, her experience with her husband' s arrest and her own, all this had severely traumatized her. A psychiatrist would perhaps have been able heal the wounds of her soul, but my mother couldn't.

With a group of people who had somehow organised a vehicle, my aunt left at the end of the summer of 1945 in the hope of finding a trace of her husband somewhere in the West. One afternoon after She had asked many people as usually if they knew anything about her husband, she was walking up a road, very tired and disappointed, when she suddenly saw a man coming down the same road. He was her husband. What a happy end for them.

From 1946 on my mother, one of her brothers and I lived in a small village not far away from Einbeck, after having been expelled from Silesia. In 1947 my father returned from American war captivity in Italy, in 1948 one more brother from Siberia In 1950 my father had the chance of renting a bakery in a town in the region. Just as before in my hometown I lived again together with four adults. In 1955 Aunt lisp sent me a book we had just read at school: Anne Frank's Diary and she invited me to stay a couple of days with her and my uncle' in my summer holidays and I enjoyed some marvellous days with them and was happy.

One afternoon at the end of my visit Aunt Ilse started a conversation about Anne Frank's Diary and she wanted to know what we had been told at school about the Jews and their persecution under Hitler. I told her we had read her diary, we had seen it on stage, we had deeply been moved by her fate, but we had not been given much further Information.

Then my aunt showed me a book with the title. A Different Diary of Anne Frank. It was a book with photos of the Holocaust.

For me, who had not even seen a naked person before, those photos of executions of men, women and children mostly naked, mere skin and bone, being cruelly murdered or already murdered were a terrible shock. At that moment in my aunt's apartment my unburdened adolescence had come to an end.

Back home again I felt very lonely with these images in my mind. None of my friends really wanted to listen to me and my parents who were always working hard were overcharged with this subject themselves and did not know how to handle it in those days.

It was only in the 1970ies when those photos were published in magazines and the American Holocaust film was shown on TV in Germany, that finally shook up a portion of the German public.

When I think of Aunt Ilse and Uncle Hermann today, I can still see and hear them talking together and tenderly calling each other "Mannele" for Hermann and "Puttele" meaning Little Pigeon.

Ingeborg Huttig
July 2004