Anyway, he’d been declared bankrupt, and it’s not hard to imagine what a wretched life such a little man would have led as a bankrupt in a village of hard-nosed farming folk who placed a high value on money and property. But now the Führer had come to power, and with him tens of thousands of these bankrupted little men had seized their own opportunity, determined to get their share of power and property. Overnight they had acquired the power of life and death over their fellow men, or if not that, then at least the power of making them or breaking them: and if they themselves had been harshly treated in the past, they were determined to treat their fellow citizens much more harshly now.

So what kind of advice was such a man going to give his good friend Sponar, when the latter explained his and my situation to him? He knew this friend was living on a pitiful pension from social services, in a house that could be taken away from him at any time. The conversation will doubtless have gone something like this: ‘The man is a writer and he’s not a Party member, and we know from the jokes he was told by his Jewish visitor that he is no friend to the Party. We could have him put away for that alone. But that isn’t going to help us much, in six months or a year he’ll be out again, and we’ll be right back where we started. No: what we need to do is charge him with something serious and conduct a house search – we’ll probably find something. But even if we don’t, it doesn’t really matter; we’ll lock him up anyway on the serious charge, and since he won’t be questioned he won’t be able to talk his way out of it either. Best of all, of course, is if he tries to make a run for it. Then we’ll be rid of him for good, one way or the other.

But of course we won’t do anything until he has bought up the mortgages and has effectively become the owner of the house. You’ll agree to his proposals, but not give your consent to the foreclosure. I know these city types, they can’t wait, things can’t go fast enough for them, and he’ll buy on the strength of your word alone. So then he’ll be the owner, and safely out of the way, and we’ll have no trouble with the wife. She can’t put the house up for auction without your consent, and we’ll make her life there a misery – leave that to me. But we won’t let her move out until she has paid rent for the longest possible time, and definitely not before she has paid out the allowance that has been promised you and your wife for the rest of your lives. And I can guarantee, Sponar, that you and your wife are going to live to a ripe old age!’ That’s more or less what the hard-boiled old bruiser, leathery veteran of many a brawl at political meetings, will have said: not all at once, of course, but one little plan will have led on to another, until the whole villainous scheme had been cooked up to perfection. All three of them will have appeased their consciences by arguing that I was an enemy of the Party, and over the next ten years this neat little excuse was used to justify so much brutality in Germany that the trick they planned to pull on me was just a minor thing by comparison, quite benign and harmless.

My wife only learned of all this in dribs and drabs, noticing something when she was with the Sponars, or picking up on something said by her delivery lady. It’s a good thing the whole business didn’t just drop on her all at once, like a cold downpour; it might well have proved too much for her. The body can habituate itself to the most potent poisons, it’s just a matter of increasing the dosage gradually. Meanwhile the days passed, one after another, the sentry was still posted out in the street, another stood guard at the back down by the river, and nothing happened. If she had only known where I was she would have tried earlier to escape from this prison, but she knew nothing. (The good doctor had not been able to get a message to her, of course – that’s why the sentry was there.) In the end it was the old lady who told her they were saying in the village that I was in the nick in nearby Fürstenwalde. No sooner had my wife received this tip-off than she made up her mind. She waited until the late evening, after supper, when it was getting dark. Then, in order to throw the evil Sponars off the scent, she turned the taps full on to fill the bath noisily and turned up the volume on the radio, got our sleeping boy out of bed and dressed him. Holding him in her arms and leaving everything else behind, she slipped out into the garden in her stockinged feet, put on her shoes and crept along to the garden gate. She had already observed, especially at night, that the sentries, while still in place, were so tired after their long hours on duty that they relaxed their guard somewhat, often wandering a long way up and down the street. So she waited for such a moment, when the SA man was eighty or a hundred paces away, crossed the street and disappeared into the dark forest of thin pine trees, where she walked on through the night, with no path to follow. The hardest thing to cope with was the child in her arms, who had picked up on her agitation, wouldn’t go to sleep, and kept on asking questions. In the end she managed to calm him down (and herself too, therefore) by telling him little stories in a low voice.