In 1938 [my father] was arrested with a lot of other people. The famous knock at the door, which wasn't in the middle of the night, and he was taken off to a concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, which later became quite famous. But we have to remember that in those days the concentration camps were, well they were called 're-education' camps, and nobody was killed in those camps, there weren't any gas chambers then, at that time. But anyway, they put all the Jews, or the non-Aryans, in there for re-education, and they told them, here you are and here you will stay until and unless you give us proof that you've arranged to emigrate. Because they wanted to get rid of all the Jews and the non-Aryans from Germany. So, on the one hand, it was a simple extortion manoeuvre, because when you left, you just took a little bit of money, no gold, no jewellery, and so everything was left behind, and, of course, the Nazis just pocketed all that money. When you treat a whole group of people like that, hundreds and hundreds of people, possibly, well probably thousands, yes, it comes to money when you collect all that booty, which they did. So, in 1938 when my father was arrested and put in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, my mother had to run about frantically finding a way of getting him out, and it took about two months. In the end she bought a Peruvian visa, which you could buy in those days and, on the basis of the Peruvian visa, we got an English transit visa. In the meantime my father had arranged, had sort of, semi-arranged a job in Canada as works photographer in a factory in Saskatchewan. But the paperwork wasn't complete at the time when we left, so we had to find a way of getting out of Germany before that paperwork came through, so that's what led to the Peruvian visa and the English transit visa. And, so we finally left at the end of June 1939, two months before the outbreak of war. We packed up all our belongings, and they were packed in things that nowadays they would be called containers, but then they were called lifts. They were great big boxes. They were supposed to be sent on to us, the furniture and bits and pieces, but actually the war broke out and they ended up being bombed by the RAF in Bremerhaven Harbour. So we never got any of that stuff, including my little model railway which I missed severely, sadly.
