Herr Fenner hesitated a long time before granting me unpaid leave, because it was getting harder and harder to get staff. Most men who were fit for military service had already been called up. On top of that, I was now sixteen and my juvenile identity papers were invalid. I needed a passport. Like Juliana, I received an Alien's Passport with “stateless” as the nationality. Then I had to get an exit visa and an entry visa for Italy. It was a travel document that had to be renewed annually, and with which I could return to the territory of the Reich at any time as long as it was valid. But once my visa for the country I was visiting ran out, I could be deported to Germany at any time.

I'll never forget the railroad journey from Berlin to Rome. It was long, and we traveled straight through without changing trains. Just before the border to the Ostmark, as Austria had been called since its annexation by Germany in 1938, the “countrymen” fetched out their drums and began to play and sing African music, as they had in the Völkerschauen. There was soon a crowd of travelers listening outside the carriage. To our surprise we were joined by Otto Gebühr, who played Frederick the Great in a number of films in the 1930s. He was also on his way to a film shoot in Rome and enthusiastically joined in. That inspired the other passengers, especially the Italians, to start clapping along. And so the whole carriage was soon a racket on wheels. I was uncomfortable, because we were now approaching the Brenner Pass, which was the border station between the Reich and Italy, and I was anxious about how the border guards would react. When they tried to check the passports they could barely get through because of all the people in our carriage. But it all went well and we continued on to bella Italia.

We were supposed to spend about four weeks in Rome, and we stayed in a small hotel in the middle of town.