Whenever someone was ill it had to be reported immediately to the Ausländerbetreuer by telephone. Otherwise there were no checks or roll-calls. I just had to report to the camp in the evening to collect my food for the next day, which consisted of 125 grams of bread and a piece of margarine, cheese or sausage. That was eaten up as soon as I got my hands on it, because I was always hungry.

If I couldn't get away, I had to find another strategy for survival: be smart and act dumb. Not too far away, near Tresckow Park in Friedrichsfelde, there was a tract of allotment gardens which I knew because before the war I had collected grass for the rabbits there and chatted with some of the allotment holders. Many of them were living on their allotments permanently, some because they had been bombed out of their homes. Some of them remembered me. I asked cautiously whether there was anywhere I could get a place to sleep. The wife of a policeman whom I also knew helped me. He had been sent to Poland in 1941 and had clearly taken part in the notorious actions of the killing squads; when he returned he was a broken man. He never talked about it, but you could see it from the way he was. I had known him as a cheerful soul. Now he only ever spoke when he absolutely had to, and never to me.

I was able to stay with an old Russian lady in the allotments. She had fled the Soviet Union after the First World War and was glad in these hard times to have someone nearby at night. My bedroom was a cold room into which nothing more than the bed would fit. I was able to wash at the garden pump. I only needed to fetch my food for the next day from the camp and then I would disappear into the allotments. In the morning I would appear punctually at my workplace. That became my routine. The allotments were about halfway between Adlergestell and Lichtenberg.