And then, when I cautiously turned my head to look back, I saw the doctor’s big car still there, as he watched us crawl away at a snail’s pace. The dear man had not driven on: back then, in Germany, people knew well enough what it meant when they saw a car with SA men inside and a civilian sitting between them!

We drove into the little town of Fürstenwalde. It’s only a one-horse town, a miserable, provincial little place with wretched cobbled streets, but I greeted it like the City of Zion on high, the City of the Redeemer: the humblest citizen, the children playing in the street, everything increased my confidence that now I was safe. The worst of the danger was past; back then even the Nazis were not quite ready to kill their opponents out on the street in broad daylight.

We stopped in front of the police station, and my leader disappeared inside with a couple of his minions. We had a long wait, and once again it seemed that not everything was going to plan with me. And it really wasn’t going to plan: even if Göring’s own stormtroopers were not following his edicts, other people were. After a while my leader reappeared with a blue-uniformed police officer, pointed at me and said: ‘That’s him. Take him into protective custody!’39

‘No, I’m not doing that’, said the policeman obstinately. ‘Without papers I’m not doing it.’

‘But I’ve told you already, I’ll get you the papers! I can’t leave the man running around on the loose in the meantime! He’s not going to wait for me! So just do it!’

‘Papers first!’ came the reply. ‘Without papers we can’t take in anyone here.’ The man was adamant. ‘Bloody hell!’ swore the leader angrily. Then he had a thought – he’d found a way round it. ‘Well, come back inside, then. I’ll make out the papers myself.’

They disappeared inside, and this time the negotiations were successful. When they reappeared, the blue-uniformed officer muttered: ‘All right, come with me.’ Before I followed him inside, I cast a last glance at the brownshirts. The several hours I had spent in their company had not deepened my fondness for them. I felt a pressing desire not to have anything to do with them or their like anytime soon – and preferably never again.

The cell they took me to was the scurviest and most disgusting hole I had ever been in in my entire life. I’m not even talking about the obscenities that covered the once-whitewashed cell walls from floor to ceiling, either scribbled in pencil or scratched into the chalky surface with a nail. I’m talking about the appalling standards of hygiene. The straw mattress, which was falling apart, the mouldy, flattened straw spilling out of it, the filthy floor covered with bits of dirt – it all pointed clearly to the fact that all was not well with the administration of the good town of Fürstenwalde – even under the Third Reich. When I gingerly lifted the straw mattress between two fingers, I uncovered swarms of bedbugs; alerted to their presence, I now saw their trails everywhere, on the walls, around the bed – wide, reddish-brown splats of blood or squashed bedbug corpses with their trails of blood tapering to a point behind them. But the worst thing about this disgusting place was the bucket in the corner. It was badly battered and hadn’t been emptied for a long time, so that a big puddle of faeces and stale urine had formed all around it. Although most of the window panes in the high-level window of the cell were broken, the air in the cell was thick with this hellish stench, which made it a torment just to draw breath. The act of breathing made you want to throw up at the thought of letting this filthy stench into your body even for a single breath. You couldn’t sit and you couldn’t lie down, and you couldn’t really pace up and down; there was just one small spot that was clean enough to stand on at least.

And it’s a strange thing: I’d just managed to escape almost certain death, and in a manner of speaking I was now safe, yet the outrage I felt about the pigsty they’d put me in outweighed everything else. I had not been anything like so furious with my brown-shirted friends – who did, after all, try to kill me – as I was with the policeman who had put me in this hole. I had only been taken into protective custody, and yet they had the nerve to put me in this squalid hole, fit only for some verminous lowlife! Had these people forgotten the meaning of the words ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in Germany, or what? Then it was high time that I reminded them! And I began to hammer on the iron-plated door, alternately using my fists and my heels. I could hear a muffled echo in the corridor, but it had absolutely no other effect. I hammered on the door again from time to time, and in between I shouted, but nobody came.