nationalism that had become a feature of political life since 1919. The Nazis had taken power early in 1933 and rapidly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Antisemitism was integrated into public policy and became progressively more oppressive for those affected. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 Isidor Pinkus lost his customers. The day after the pogrom she was handed a letter at school addressed to her father from the mayor of Berlin in which Ellen's father was requested to remove her from the school. One teacher called her aside and whispered that he wished her "all the best", while other teachers and fellow-pupils looked away. For Jewish pupils, exclusion from the school turned out to be permanent. She never had an opportunity to sit for her school final exams (Abitur), and despite later attempts to catch up after she had left Germany, she would never succeed in completing her schooling. Escape to Argentina For the first few years of the Nazi regime, arrests and detentions of Jews had been restricted to the overtly politically engaged, but during the (exceptionally cold) winter of 1938/39 a large number of working age Jewish men in Berlin were arrested and placed in labour camps. Those who persuaded the authorities they intended to leave Germany would be released after six weeks: others were used for forced labour. The Gestapo came for Ellen's father on 10 December 1938 but he was out: as they left, the arresting officers passed Isidor Pinkus as he came home, but they did not recognise him and he naturally ignored them. Ellen's mother saw the encounter from the window of their apartment, and made arrangements to hide her husband with her 85-year-old father, at the same time starting to plan her 18-year-old daughter's emigration. She herself was unwilling to emigrate because it would have been necessary to leave her own father behind. Regulations meant that they would have been forced to leave their money and other worldly goods (apart from ten Marks) behind in Germany. Isidor Pinkus, more simply, "felt too old to start form the beginning again somewhere else". Ellen's emigration was part of a larger scale children's emigration programme organised by the CV. Jewish associations had been banned and meetings of more than two or three would have attracted suspicion from the authorities, but if people took care to visit one another only in ones and twos,