Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten, Volume 2

The diaries (somewhat abridged) of Klemperer (1881-1960), a baptized Jew married to a non-Jew, who was, until his forced retirement in 1935, professor of Romance languages at the Technische Hochschule Dresden. Records the couple's despair at increasingly painful deprivations. Their halfhearted efforts to emigrate failed. Describes their neighbors in the cramped "Jewish houses", companions in forced labor camps, the changing moods among the Jews, the estrangement of friends, and the sympathy and helpfulness of many strangers. For a long time, Jews in mixed marriages were spared deportation but they lived in constant fear - of house searches accompanied by beatings, humiliations, and vandalism, and of imprisonment, deportation, and death. In February 1945 Jewish spouses of mixed marriages and their children were called up for deportation, but the bombing of Dresden on 13-14 February allowed many of them to escape. The Klemperers wandered, as bomb victims under an assumed name, from place to place, until liberated by the American army.