- 1942, March 16, Monday – At midday on Friday relatives bring underwear for the prisoners in the police cells. As long as the underwear is accepted and exchanged for used underwear, then the man is at least still there. If the underwear is refused, then he has been transported to a concentration camp. Elsa Kreidl comes home almost consoled: “He’s still inside.” (For four months now—no one knows why.) In the last few days I heard Auschwitz (or something like it), near Konigshütte in Upper Silesia, mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp. **p28
- 1942, April 12, Sunday – About the most recent house searches and suicides. When and how will the house search take place here? About the evacuees. Are they still alive? No news for months now. Shall we have to go? How much longer? Will they murder us first? — Yesterday something unheard of. After five months a sign of life from Ernst Kreidl: A card from Buchenwald. The joy at it was shattering. He is alive, he is not in Auschwitz, he is permitted to write every two weeks and receive post, he is permitted 15M a month—one can hope that he will survive! **p39
- 1942, October 17, Saturday late afternoon – Today for the first time news from a concentration camp of the death of two women. Until now only the men died there. Of these two women, one had had a forbidden fish in her refrigerator, the other had taken the tram on her way to the doctor, when she should have used it only to go to her place of work. Both were transported from the women’s camp in Mecklenburg to Auschwitz, which appears to be a swift-working slaughterhouse. **p155
- 1942, October 30, Friday morning – The sister in the concentration camp was described as determined and energetic; she was allowed to write once every two weeks […]. The last expected letter did not arrive, and now news of her death has come. From Auschwitz, cause of death “stroke.” She is the ninth Dresden woman, to be taken from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz. **p161
- 1942, November 4, Wednesday midday – For three months we have not been allowed to subscribe to or buy a newspaper. Nor Eva—”Jewish household.” … uncertainty, danger everywhere—a newspaper discovered is enough for Auschwitz. **p163
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- 1943, January 8, Friday morning – At the Community, where I fetched the new ration cards late yesterday afternoon and glanced at the newspaper, Hirschel informed me of Eger’s death. In his fiftieth year. Myocardial insufficiency. Auschwitz camp. The ashes are not being sent. The widow is to be notified. Hirschel asked me to undertake this notification. I hesitated without refusing. “I cannot say to her: ‘God will comfort you, etc.’ **p187
- 1942, January 14, Thursday afternoon – Mentally I am knocked out. The humiliation of the “travel permit,” the issue of the house between Eva and myself, the constant dreadful fear of Auschwitz. Last night I dreamed in great detail that I had gone into a cafe without the star and was now sitting there afraid of being recognized. **p190
- 1943, January 17, Sunday midday – A language teacher called Kronthal was arrested at about the same time as Eger. Mixed marriage. No property—but is said to have made incautious remarks and given private lessons beyond what he was permitted. (To Hirschel’s children, for example, and Hirschel was inside as a result.) Now news of death from Auschwitz—the urn will not be sent. Jacobi, the cemetery custodian, told me that yesterday. **p190
- 1943, April 25, Easter Sunday morning – It can happen to me at any moment. And then to sit in the cell and wait minute by minute for the executioner, perhaps for a day, perhaps for weeks, and perhaps no one strangles me here […], but I die only on the way to the concentration camp (“shot while attempting to escape”) or in Auschwitz itself (of “heart failure”). It is so awful to think through all the details with regard to myself, with regard to Eva. I repress it again and again, want to make the best of every day, every hour. Perhaps I shall survive after all. **p215
- 1943, May 14, Friday morning – … Kahane was the sixth to be arrested, the seventh man was Imbach, the remnants of whose family we got to know as our fellow lodgers—the mother was sent to Theresienstadt, one daughter lived here alone, until she was deported to Poland, another daughter died in Auschwitz during our time; we occasionally met the married brother; he lived on Emser Allee—so this seventh man, in a mixed marriage, was summoned to the Gestapo for yesterday, he did not go and has disappeared. Perhaps suicide, perhaps in a hiding place. **p229
- 1943, June 5, Saturday morning – For two weeks now there has been no new arrest, no new case of death — and Leipziger is said to have been taken “only” to the Auschwitz labor camp and not to Auschwitz concentration camp — and already the great fear has been forgotten. **p236
- 1943, August 23, Monday, Afternoon toward six o’clock – I said to Konrad, who, as chargeman, has to put up with a lot of unpleasantness: “You are helpless, because your authority lacks any appropriate sanction. If you wanted to reprimand someone for an offense, report an act of insubordination, then the punishment for anything and everything would instantly and only be death, because the merest trifle leads one into the clutches of the Gestapo and so to a certain death.” (Into prison and from there to “suicide” or to “shot while attempting to escape” or to Auschwitz with various causes of death.) **p255
- 1944, August 14, Monday evening – News of the Hirschels has often reached one or other person, and we heard of the death of Jon Neumann, and that Frau Ida Kreidl was well. Now it is said that a great number of the Theresienstadt people have been transported, perhaps to Auschwitz, perhaps to their death. **p344
- 1944, September 19, Tuesday morning – Printed close together in the newspaper: Air raid on Auschwitz (concentration camp); “air raid on Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar: the prisoners Thalmann and Breitscheid are among the dead.” How much of that is true and how much the covering-up of murder? **p360
- 1944, November 26, Sunday late afternoon – I heard about the fate of the Frischmann family: The girl together with her friend Ruth Spanier presumably in Auschwitz, sent to certain death therefore; her father in Radeberg labor camp; her mother, an Aryan, sentenced to two and a half years in prison.**p378
- 1945, January 29, Monday morning – He told us—incidentally not always on a friendly footing with foreign words—about a speech by Thomas Mann; according to it the Germans murdered one and a half million (the figure was given down to the last hundred) Jews in Auschwitz and ground down their bones to use as fertilizer. The exact figure was owed to German thoroughness, a record had been kept of every single dead Jew, **p397
- Notes, 1942, March 16– Auschwitz: This is the first time that Victor Klemperer has heard the name Auschwitz. Auschwitz was one of six camps established by the Nazis in Poland to facilitate the “Final Solution,” that is, to murder Jews. Originally a labor camp, it was in March 1942 that large numbers of Jews began to be deported there and either killed or worked and starved to death. **p516
- Notes, 1942, June 8 — It was declared to be “Jewish arson”: On May 18,1942, members of the Herbert Baum group (a Jewish Communist resistance group) caused a fire at the National Socialist propaganda exhibition. The Soviet Paradise, in Berlin. In a revenge operation carried out between May 27 and 29… **p517
- Notes, 1942, September 7 – 1942, fifty Dresden Jews were sent to Theresienstadt on Transport V/6. Thirty-nine died in Theresienstadt, Fritz Marckwald as early as September 14. Those who did not die in Theresienstadt were transported to Auschwitz and died there. **p520
- Notes,1944, February 28 — evacuation was imminent: At the end of February 1943, Commissar Schmidt (see note, December 11,1942) received an order from Adolf Eichmann in person to liquidate the Hellerberg camp. During the night of March 2-3, the inmates were taken to Dresden-Neustadt goods station, loaded into cattle trucks, and deported to Auschwitz. **p528
- Notes, 1944, June 12 — Kahlenberg and the Hirschels would be evacuated “tomorrow”: The Kahlenbergs and the Hirschel family are recorded as arriving in Theresienstadt on June 21, 1943. On November 28, the Hirschel family with their two sons, and Kahlenberg and his mother, were taken to Auschwitz on a so-called family transport and apparently gassed immediately. **p523
- Notes, 1944, July 1 — Ilse Frischmann… “fetched”: Ilse Frischmann, then 22, was sent to Auschwitz. She survived the camp and returned to Dresden after the war. **p527
- Notes, 1945, January 29 — had found the books: A reference, in fact, to Thomas Mann’s broadcast of January 14,1945. In it Mann stated: “Between April 15,1942, and April 15, 1944, in these two German establishments [the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau] alone, 1,715,000 Jews were murdered.” **p531
Source:
- ** I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2: A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945, Victor Klemperer, Publisher : Modern Library; Illustrated edition
Purchase on Amazon:
- UK English I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries Of Victor Klemperer
- Deutsch: Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-1945
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