The Friday evening stays with the family of my uncle Siegfried and my aunt Martha left a deep impression on me. Soon I was regularly accompanying my uncle to the Bornplatz synagogue on Saturday mornings. He was also the only relative with whom I could talk about the problems with my parents. His older son Ernst had been arrested by the Nazis in 1933 shortly after his high school graduation for belonging to a left-wing group and then emigrated to Holland immediately after his release. After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he later joined the Dutch resistance, was caught and put to death in Auschwitz. The two younger children were staunch Zionists. Herbert, later Gershon, went to a kibbutz in Palestine in 1935 when he was seventeen. However, my sister and I had the closest connection with his sister Ruth, called Maus by us, born in 1920, who spent a lot of time with us, preparing us for the Jewish holidays and also teaching us the ethical principles of Zionism. I saw myself more and more as a Jew than as a German.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 61 (translation)