Osnabrück 2005
“I would like to differentiate between two periods. A turning point was the so-called ‘Kristallnacht’ - the November pogrom. Until the ‘Kristallnacht’, until the November pogrom, the politics of the Nazis, the German Jews - the Jews in Germany were Germans, were culturally Germans - To make life so difficult that they would leave Germany. The problem was that there was nowhere to go. After the ‘Kristallnacht’ it became more and more difficult and emigration was forbidden after 1941. Jews were no longer allowed to emigrate more emigrate because the Nazis wanted to kill them, and then the mass murders began, the deportations to the concentration camps.
This is something we didn’t go through.
But there was nowhere to go. And it was a great miracle that we could go to America. About 25,000 German and Austrian Jews went to Shanghai.”