Mother realized our door was open and saw our little faces peeking through. She reassured us and tucked us into bed. But for a long time I couldn’t sleep, trying to understand what was going on, and feeling that a terrible message must have been in that letter. In the morning Mother explained to us that we had to leave Germany very quickly. There was great hustle and bustle in the house. Many friends came to help pack. There were phone calls all day long, and we were told to keep out of the way and to stay in our rooms. We felt totally confused and isolated, particularly when it turned out that Father had to depart in a great hurry, and that he was going far away.
The hand-delivered document was an official notice informing us that we, the whole family Kagan, being Russian Jews, were ordered to leave Germany within exactly ten days. If we did not comply and stayed even one additional day, we would be deported and put into a concentration camp.
During the First World War, Father had been taken a Russian prisoner in Germany. After the war he did not wish to return to Communist Russia. Though he kept his Russian citizenship, he was more than happy to remain in Germany where he had made many good friends. Thus he stayed on to work and to enjoy his freedom. When he met Hildi Wallach3, my beautiful mother, it was love at first sight.
They got married, had two children, and as he had retained his Russian citizenship, my German born mother and her children automatically had to become Russians as well. Ironically, this was now one of our saving graces. As Russian Jews we were forced to leave Germany and thus had a chance to save our lives.
At that time, I understood very little of what was happening. But I was terrified and full of apprehension even before the fatal night of our expulsion. Our gentle, cozy home had suddenly become a fearful place, and everything seemed to fall apart.
Two days after receiving the expulsion letter, my father left for Bremen where he was to catch the “Manhattan”, the very next boat for New York. In Bremen he was lodged by a Catholic friend, a silversmith, who escorted him to the boat, wished him well and sent him off with a bottle of brandy.
Father traveled on a visitor’s visa sent to him by his sister Mary who lived in New York. He had had it for several years and kept renewing it, as he could never tear himself away from his family. Now he was only too happy to use it, for he was convinced that once in the USA, he would be able to acquire visas for us all and to have us follow him. His departure left us feeling completely lost and in a total turmoil. All we were allowed to ship to our next destination was a large box – called a container – with some furniture and whatever we could squeeze into it. Friends, neighbors, Jews and non-Jews, all came to help us and so did my mother’s father who later on, with the assistance of friends in the Vatican, managed to escape to the United States with my step-grandmother.
We left Worms, our home, our friends, our past for a completely unknown future, and our first stop was in Munich to say good-bye to my grandmother. Vladimir and I stayed with our beloved granny Emma. It was the very last time we saw her. She was later deported and died in Theresienstadt.
We still needed visas for any country that would harbor us on our way to the United States. There were many disappointments. My grandfather, a prominent Munich citizen and former War Veteran, was very well to do with many connections in the outside world.
His efforts to get us visas were of no avail. Nor could my mother’s sister in Denmark or her brother in Spain be of any help. She was married to a Protestant and relative of a famous Danish writer and her brother’s wife was a Spanish Catholic. But all this did not open any doors.4
After all our possibilities seemed exhausted, my mother suddenly remembered some Jewish friends who with their family, a few years ago, had emigrated to France. She contacted them in Metz where they were living and luckily! – they were able to get us a two months’ visa to stay in France. This, however, was finalized on the very last and dreaded tenth day of our residence permit in Germany. If by then we had not left the country, we were to be deported to some concentration camp. We therefore had to leave immediately.
The container5 had been shipped to the USA, and all we had with us were three small suitcases and the equivalent of $200,00, the only money we were permitted to take out. With warm, hopeful send-offs and tears, yet much relieved, we finally took off after emotionally loaded good-byes at the station.
It was a cold, gray day in the middle of March 1938. Mother was 32 [in fact, 34] years old and though her heart was trembling, she showed great courage and put on a cheerful air for the sake of her two children. We left on the train to Saarbrücken, a border town6, where we were to catch our connecting train at 7.00 p.m. to Metz in France.
Once on the moving train, it was like turning a page of my life. After the painful separation from all that was secure and dear to me I felt almost elated, as if we were on our way to a new phase of freedom and maybe to a life without fear. The train was chugging along. There was a smell of burnt coals as smoke slid past our windows. We were alone in our compartment.
Suddenly I looked up and saw my mother’s face turned pale. She produced a document out of her handbag and with a trembling voice she read out to us the frightening words of our “Ausweis”7 with its official stamp and date: our German permit had expired the previous day. We should have been out of Germany today. Mother was panic stricken. She felt that this document could cause us problems at the border and that she had to get rid of it. Against Vladi’s advice, while I was crying bitterly, frightened and confused, she tore it up into bits and pieces which she threw out of the window of the moving train, like flurries of snow flying in the wind. She closed the window and we huddled together, waiting silently for our arrival in Saarbrücken scheduled for 6.00 p.m.
When we reached our destination, few people got off the train and the platform was almost empty. We stood there with our few belongings, trying to decide what next, until my big brother Vladi, bright and attentive, spotted the “Zollamt”8, the Customs Office. We slowly crossed the silent station, and after a moment’s hesitation we went to it. We were met by a Gestapo man with ice blue eyes and a face cut in steel. He was dressed in Gestapo uniform, all in black: the tightfitting belt around his slim waist, the shiny boots and the typical casket with its Nazi insignia on his hat and on his jacket.8a
He motioned us into his office and ordered Mother to show her papers. With trembling hands she handed them over. He skimmed through them and then insisted that an important document was missing with an official stamp and a permission to leave Germany and to enter France. Without it he categorically refused to let us catch our 7 o’clock train to France. Our hearts sank. … Mother tried to explain how and why she tore up the missing document and that she had been afraid it would detain us, and cause problems. But he said: “No, madam, it is now that you have a problem. There is no way I can let you leave Germany. You must wait for tomorrow. …” Until then we would not be allowed to leave the station. We had to spend the night in the “Bahnhof Buffet”9. He took us there and left us – in this bleak, empty, cold, so-called “restaurant”.
I remember the one light bulb hanging down on a wire over our heads, the table bare, made of cheap wood full of greasy stains. The benches we sat on had no backing, and were too narrow to recline or to rest on. Vladimir had to go to the toilet, which was just outside the “Buffet”. He returned quickly rather upset. The toilet “lady” asked him for money for the use of the toilet. He had none. So she refused him. Mother had already changed all our money into French francs. Instead, she gave Vladimir an apple for the lady who took it and let him use the toilet.
Reunited in the “Buffet”, we nibbled on our picnic. Vladimir tried to cheer us up and played some German melodies for us on his accordion. It did make us forget for a moment where we were and we even