»To be picked up is to be killed« — Eyewitness interview with Kurt Hillmann

Kurt Hillmann was born in Berlin in 1933 as the son of a Jewish Polish mother and a German father. He had experiences with anti-Semitism at an early age. Later, his life is marked by war: bombing raids, air raids, burning houses. In 1944 he managed to go into hiding in a home for children suffering from tuberculosis in the Allgäu region. When Hillmann returned to Berlin in October 1945 to visit his father, he learned that his mother had died because no doctor wanted to treat her. All of his mother’s relatives, the Singer and Jakubowicz families, were first deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto and later murdered in the Kulmhof extermination camp with the exhaust fumes of trucks.