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prepared to provide asylum for additional numbers, in return for significant sums of money. The unwillingness of the participating countries to offer shelter to those frantically seeking safety allowed Hitler and Goebbels to declare with superior irony how astounding it was that Germany was criticised for its treatment of the Jews when no one else wanted them either.

      Eva’s brother, Alex Heckscher, who had moved to London with his family some years earlier, made a special trip to Chicago to persuade Leon Freeman, a wealthy uncle with no children of his own, to stand guarantor for his sister and her family. On the strength of his affidavit the American Consulate in Stuttgart allocated Ernst, who was born in Czechoslovakia, a place on the Czech list. He was fortunate; many others, including my mother’s parents, who had travelled to Stuttgart on the day before Kristallnacht, returned home to ponder the futility of their endeavours. Many committed suicide. On 18 August Ernst was allocated sixty-first place in the Czech quota. Even though this was a relatively high position, the wait was estimated at up to two years. Who could know if the family would be able to survive in Germany for that length of time? Ernst could not afford to abandon other plans and maintained close contact with Alfred in Palestine. But by then, he noted in his memoirs, the cost of a ‘capitalist’ certificate had risen to 60,000 marks. The figure was extraordinarily high given the sums cited just a few months earlier by Alfred’s friend after visiting Regina, but it presumably included the costs for the whole family of six. Places were hard to obtain at any price and Ernst had seemingly left the matter rather late.

      They arrested him early on 10 November. ‘I don’t remember them coming for my father,’ Jenny, who was just seven at the time, reflected. ‘Later in the morning our relative Recha arrived with a big car to pick us up. There was a door from our flat which led directly into the robing room of the synagogue. From there, a second door opened onto the ladies’ gallery. That morning those doors were gone and I could see straight through into the ruins of the synagogue. The black sky and charred remains of the metal supports of the huge dome haunted me in nightmares for years.’ That was all which remained of the great and beautiful house of prayer on Frankfurt’s Boerneplatz. Strangely, my mother’s father, for thirty years a rabbi to Frankfurt’s liberal community, was at that very moment observing the same view from the other side of the ruins. Alleging that he possessed the keys, a claim they must have known to be false as it was a strictly orthodox synagogue, the Gestapo had ordered him to come immediately to the burning building. There were firemen present, he recalled, but no one did anything to extinguish the flames. As he walked through the crowds watching the spectacle he heard people say: ‘Das wird sich rächen’ (‘this will be avenged’).

      Disregarding Regina’s remonstrations that, with his wife so heavily pregnant, Ernst was badly needed at home, the Gestapo took him away. They brought him first to the local police station and from there to the Festhalle, the concert hall, which my mother’s father also remembered all too well from his own arrest. There Ernst found his uncle Aron whom the Nazis had rewarded for his outstanding services to the city by dismissing him from his post just weeks after they came to power. When, at 1.20 a.m. on the morning of 10 November, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Service, issued orders that ‘as many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing jails’,1 he stipulated that only males in good health were to be taken and specifically excluded the elderly. But age did not protect Uncle Aron; they picked him up anyway. He was one of the very few later to be released from that hall, where hundreds of Jewish men were gathered, humiliated, intimidated and beaten, prior to their deportation to concentration camps. Soon afterwards he managed to escape to the United States with his wife and daughter.

      Ernst himself was not so fortunate. Of the three camps to which thousands of Jews were deported in the following days, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, the last was widely considered the worst. Construction had begun in 1937, but in the autumn of 1938 the site was still in a primitive state. What huts there were often had no floors, only wet earth. The water supply was almost non-existent and there was no proper provision for sewage; open latrines made even elemental hygiene virtually impossible. Ernst was part of the first group of men to be sent there from Frankfurt and was therefore able to find some kind of shelter. Prisoners who arrived later were simply left out in the open for hours or even days:

      We came to a large barracks where there were bunks in three tiers. I at once went to the highest and found some people there. One of them felt bad because he had some money on him, which was forbidden. I borrowed 120 marks, which was useful for me as I decided to do as I did in the army – not to eat any of their treifa [unkosher] food. The next morning I found someone who had taken along his Tefillin [phylacteries, small leather boxes containing verses from the Torah worn during weekday morning prayers] which I could use at any time. They cut all our hair off our heads and gave us black striped prison uniforms. I managed to put my watch and money in my pockets.

      These brief sentences convey little of what Ernst was made to undergo. The journey itself must have been appalling. He and three hundred other Jews from Frankfurt, all men, had been taken to a goods siding and loaded into fourth-class carriages. When they arrived at the station in Weimar, from where they had to walk the remaining distance to the camp, the platforms had, out of sheer sadism, been smeared with soap. On entering the camp many of the prisoners were severely beaten. ‘Of atrocities I saw only public flagellation,’ Ernst recalled. ‘The guards used vulgar words at any opportunity they saw a Jew. I tried to calm my neighbours down by telling them that they wouldn’t be offended if a dog barked at them in the street.’ Ernst was given the prisoner number 10205 and labelled an Aktionsjude, a Jew arrested during the ‘actions’, or round-ups, following Kristallnacht.

      Keeping kosher, in so far as there was anything available at all which could be called food, no doubt took great courage. Reciting prayers also brought the risk of violence if caught. One political prisoner, Karl Wack, reported having to record the name of a dying man who had been hit over the head repeatedly by an SS officer for praying aloud.2 Yet Ernst faithfully maintained his strict standards of Jewish observance, as he had done throughout his army service in the First World War. His conduct must have served as an inspiring example to his comrades; it also saved him from an illness which plagued many others:

      They put bicarbonate of soda into the food claiming that this calms people down, but it only caused diarrhoea. They made us stand for hours without permitting the use of a toilet.

      Meanwhile the family were doing everything possible to obtain his release. Despite being nine months pregnant, Eva, like tens of thousands of other women across Germany whose husbands had been sent to concentration camps, did her utmost to gain the essential papers, which, with the promise of a visa, might procure her husband’s freedom. The British Consulate on the Guiollettstrasse in Frankfurt’s West End became a focal point for thousands of desperate people; queues often stretched across the pavement and round the block. The staff struggled to bring comfort and hope to the throngs of people waiting anxiously in every corner of the building and in the streets outside. ‘They offered us tea and sandwiches; they spoke to us like human beings and gave us back our dignity,’ one lady remembered. The Deputy Consul, Arthur Dowden, even drove round the streets seeking out terrified people, to whom he gave food and drink.

      From Jerusalem, Alfred wrote to relatives in Amsterdam requesting their urgent intervention. By now he was all too familiar with every detail of the immigration process for Palestine. But how were matters to be arranged, with Ernst in a concentration camp and his heavily pregnant wife living in a hospital with their four young children because their home and the adjacent synagogue had been burnt down? In particular, how could the necessary funds be made available in Tel Aviv for a certificate to Palestine, when the Nazis had made it illegal to transfer money out of Germany?

      Jerusalem

      18 November 1938

      My dear ones,

      We have received news from Frankfurt that Ernst too has been arrested. Eva, who’s expecting a child any day, is in hospital in the Gagernstrasse, where the other children also are. They were living until now in the Boerneplatz, in what used to be the rabbi’s home, which is, as we suppose,

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