Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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This also led to Jews meeting other Jews who had been in hiding. An example of
this was when Joachim Freiberg recognised his friend Oscar Eisenstedt:
In the shelter there was this guy wearing dark blue glasses and he was always
hanging onto his wife and everybody assumed that he was blind. And my
father kept looking at him and he kept looking at my father; although you
couldn’t tell because of the glasses. And one day they bumped into each other
and he was very frightened and they realised that they knew each other quite
well – it was Eisenstedt. All that time his wife had kept him hidden. 249
Shelter was also taken at other venues, including the bombed-out Saint
Catherine’s Church on Breiter Weg. 250 However, the majority of the remaining
Jews were to perish during such air raids. One such example was that of the
family of Walter Heinemann. During an air raid, Heinemann, together with his
non-Jewish wife and one of his sons, Rolf, was killed. His surviving son, Gerd,
witnessed liberation and eventually emigrated to Australia. 251
With the realisation that the fortunes of the war had turned against the
Germans, some Jewish children simply stopped wearing the yellow star. The
exception to this rule occurred when refuge was sought in public air-raid shelters
and Jews had no option but to remove the star, as Jews were prohibited from
entry. Such risks were not undertaken by adults, indicating the level of fear still
extant even in the last months of the Reich. 252 In the final months before
liberation, the few Jews remaining did not feel the same level of fear, as the
German population was confronted with defeat, as recalled here:
By this time we were getting around a bit more than earlier, because it was
less likely that anybody was going to say anything. Most of the Germans knew
they were going to lose the war. There were certain fanatics around who still
believed way into 1945 that something would happen, but they were very few
in numbers. The vast majority knew they were going to cop it. But they kept
going. I don’t know why they kept going; it’s not for me to make an analysis
249 Name withheld, op. cit., 13 July 2004.
250 Telephone interview, name withheld on request (recorded), Sydney, 26 April 2001.
251 Name withheld, op. cit., 18 June 1999.
252 Name withheld, op. cit., 13 July 2004.