Werner Barasch hung wedged under the truck.
He could only lean on the chassis with his elbows and knees.
He held a piece of dark plywood towards the back so that no one could see him.
The exhaust pipe got hotter and hotter under his left knee, it hurt like hell.
During the second check, he suddenly cursed loudly in Spanish - soldiers pointed bayonets at him from two sides.
The young man gave up and dropped to the floor.
In his autobiography »Entronnen«, Barasch describes the most dangerous situation of his seven-year escape: In March 1942 he tried to escape from the Spanish concentration camp Miranda de Ebro.
The Franco regime held opponents from the civil war and refugees from all over Europe prisoner there.
The linguistically gifted prisoner got a lieutenant who pointed a revolver at him with a torrent of Spanish speeches to stop him: “Please don't shoot.
I'm not running away, I'm not threatening anyone! ”He later considered it a miracle that he got away alive.
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Werner Barasch 1934: His courage saved him several times
Photo: Barbara Gstaltmayr / private property Lili Laksberger & Antoinette Ross
As a Jewish boy, Barasch faced death in his native Germany.
His example shows the dangers refugees were exposed to when they tried to escape the Nazis and their allies, how they tried to free themselves with daring maneuvers, what role other European countries played - including formally "neutral" Switzerland, which was spared the war stayed, but cooperated with the National Socialists in a variety of ways.
Werner Barasch searched for a safe place for a long time.
From Berlin he went to Italy, made his way through Switzerland and France to northern Spain, and was interned in camps several times.
He was able to flee again and again until he fell into the hands of Franco's henchmen.
Family of department store pioneers
Barasch, born in 1919, grew up in a wealthy family; his father Artur Barasch and his uncle Georg had founded a chain of department stores in Germany.
The mother Irene received her PhD in languages from the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1921 the parents moved with Werner and his older sister Else from Breslau to Berlin and lived in a neat red brick villa in the Grunewald district.
Artur and Irene Barasch wanted to offer their children a good education and at the same time protect them from the "brown danger".
When he was only 14, Werner moved to Italy after Hitler came to power in 1933 and went on to school.
But even there it became risky for Jews.
In May 1938 Hitler came to Rome for a state visit.
As Barasch describes in his book, the Gestapo was soon looking for Jews in the city, and in Italy, at Mussolini's instigation, the first "race laws" came into force.
Jews were increasingly marginalized from society.
Werner Barasch fled to Zurich to live with his cousin Herta's family in the summer of 1938.
He enrolled in chemistry at university and wanted to wait in Switzerland for a visa for the USA;
his sister lived there now.
The mother Irene was stuck in Cuba for a long time before she was also allowed to enter the United States in 1941.
After only nine months, the student was not wanted in Switzerland.
Like many others, he was rigorously expelled for alleged "foreign infiltration".
Declared the enemy as a refugee
His struggle for survival continued in France, where Germans aroused suspicion after the start of the war in September 1939.
"Nobody had any idea of the persecution that the Fuehrer instigated against his own people," Barasch later recalled.
He was a refugee and was considered an enemy, while Nazi agents in Paris were unmolested even before the Wehrmacht invaded in June 1940.
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Barasch was caught during a check and was sent to several internment camps.
In Camp du Ruchard near Tours he met a group of German Jews who in 1939 took the ship “St.
Louis «wanted to save from Hamburg to Cuba.
There they were turned away, had to return to Europe and were distributed to several countries.
Refugees from the French contingent were later arrested.
In France, after the armistice, the Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis from June 1940.
That aggravated the danger again.
To avoid being transported to the notorious Gurs death camp at the foot of the Pyrenees, Barasch overcame a three-meter-high brick wall in a prison near Aix-en-Provence while the guards slept.
This escape was also well prepared:
“First I threw my bag over the wall, then I walked back ten meters. A quick run-up, a high jump, holding onto the edge of the wall with both hands, then a pull-up, the legs on the other side and a careful jump. When I landed outside, I could hear my heart pounding with the effort and excitement. "
By bike towards Switzerland
Barasch wanted to return to Switzerland by bike and cycled up to 100 kilometers a day with all his belongings in a small basket.
After a strenuous drive through the wintry mountains, French border officials caught him, but he escaped by jumping from the moving train.
He made his way to Geneva on foot.
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The feeling of security turned out to be deceptive: he was noticed during a search of a train, the Swiss police handed him over to the same French gendarmes from whom he had escaped.
That the supposedly neutral state handed him over shocked Barasch:
“That was the darkest moment of my life. Even though I feared extradition, I never thought the Swiss would do it. The extradition of a persecuted person is one of the most hideous and devastating crimes a country can commit. "
Trapped behind thick barbed wire
He was able to break out of the French camp Argelès-sur-Mer near the border with Spain during a sandstorm and reached Spain on foot across the Pyrenees - the Guardia Civil immediately picked him up.
Escape from Miranda de Ebro seemed impossible, he later wrote: "The camp was surrounded by two-meter-high concrete walls, covered at the top with rolls of barbed wire one meter in diameter." At night, bright spotlights illuminated the area.
Barasch often wondered what crime he was charged with.
Applying for an entry visa for the USA dragged on for years.
The consulates asked for papers and new guarantees.
Whenever Barasch was taken prisoner, the process stalled again.
It was only after Allied troops landed in North Africa in autumn 1942 and the German defeat at Stalingrad the following winter that the tide gradually began to turn.
Franco apparently wanted to switch sides.
The treatment of foreign prisoners in Miranda de Ebro improved, with many hoping for their release.
US authorities did not believe him
Barasch remained suspicious.
He wanted to poison himself with smuggled quinine in order to get to the infirmary and to escape from there.
Meanwhile, the sudden arrival of thousands of sick prisoners thwarted his plan.
With the help of US charities, Werner Barasch was released at the end of February 1942, spent two years "on probation" in Madrid and had to report to the police every week.
He learned only late why he had to wait so long for a visa: The Americans did not believe that he had survived his imprisonment in the French camps - all of his fellow prisoners were dead. They also did not accept the extradition from neutral Switzerland .
Only through the confirmation of the Swiss border police did he receive the longed-for USA visa.
Berlin will soon commemorate the family with Baraschstrasse
His father Artur, who did not want to leave Germany, had been robbed of all his property by the Nazis.
Later research revealed that he was murdered in Auschwitz.
Werner Barasch boarded a freighter in Lisbon and arrived in Philadelphia 17 days later.
It was May 8, 1945 - the end of the war in Europe.
After seven years of fleeing, he met his mother again in the harbor.
They settled in California, where their sister Else was already working as a doctor.
As a scientist, Barasch gained a high reputation in his new home.
He spent his retirement in a self-built house in the mountains of Santa Cruz.
He died there in 2008 at the age of 89.
A stumbling stone in front of the family's former villa in Berlin-Grunewald reminds us of Artur Barasch.
She once lived at Wissmannstrasse 11, named after Hermann von Wissmann, the once brutal governor of the "German East Africa" colony.
Like Wissmannstraße in Neukölln before, the one in Grunewald is now to be given a more worthy name - Berlin wants to commemorate the Jewish family with Baraschstraße in future, the renaming is planned for February 2022.