The Last Goodbye
SS:All the young men were gone out of the city, and then they [Nazis] started with people a little bit older than the forty years bracket.
And that’s where I like to come back to my father. He was fifty years old and he had also to report himself. And he had from the doctor on a test that he was something, which wasn’t true—something wrong with his stomach or some this or that. So, he didn’t have to go to one of these work camps, which were located fifty miles outside of the city of Amsterdam. He was assigned to work in the outskirts of Amsterdam and could come home at night to sleep over, have dinner with the family, and then the next morning at six o’clock he had to report himself again. And that went on for months, several months, and everything went fine.
One morning, again I went to the hospital where I had that job in the meantime (inaudible) that card, the stamp that I had on it, and my father went to that work camp. And in the evening, then he didn’t show up—six-thirty usually he used to come home— and I went on the street to find out what happened. They had taken all these men who were in that slave labor camp on the outskirts of Amsterdam. They took them in trains away from there, off to the death camps in Poland. Not knowing in the morning when I said goodbye to my daddy that I would never see my daddy again: that was the last time I saw my father.