Survival and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Last month I received two letters from a person previously unknown to me that brought back memories of a distant past. Concerning the fate of a motorcycle, the letters evoked a heartwarming love story with the Holocaust as background but, for once, not with a tragic ending.

The story begins in Breslau in the year 1938. Earlier that year, as one in a tiny group of “non-Aryans” who had somehow been overlooked by the authorities, I graduated at the age of seventeen from a German—and, by that time, wholly Nazified—gymnasium. It was the last season of peace in Europe. Even at my tender age, it was clear to me that war was coming and that I must leave the country of my birth as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, emigration to foreign countries had become virtually impossible unless one possessed a great deal of money and knew a way out of Germany. Lacking those assets, I found myself working in a Silesian textile factory in the city of Reichenbach (known today as Dzierżoniów, Poland). The factory belonged to a Jew. My work, which of course led nowhere, lasted for about three months until the local authorities discovered my ethnic-religious-racial origins and insisted that I leave the premises within the hour.