indeed resign from the organisation that she had herself set up. Subsequently, it became impossible for her to publish anything she wrote or anything from her late husband's literary estate. During the years of persecution her first priority remained the care of the Dehmel House, and this was the reason why, unlike others, she rejected any thought of emigration. After her sister Alice died in March 1935 she took two lengthy ocean cruises, visiting the United States, Central America and the West Indies while it was still possible for her to travel. Although few were able or willing to foresee the scale and horror of the Shoah a few years later, there was a clear sense of the net tightening on those Jews who had been unwilling (or for financial reasons unable) to leave Germany. Ida Dehmel became progressively more isolated. On 6 December 1937 she was persuaded to become a member of the Christian Evangelical Reformed Church. In 1938 the government imposed a requirement that Jews should assume "old testament names", and from this point she is identified in official documents as "Jedidja". Still she refused to abandon the Dehmel house. In a letter sent to a friend in December 1938 she wrote that she would never leave: "Marion, ich würde nie auswandern ... im Moment in dem ich das Dehmelhaus verlassen muß, mache ich Schluß.." War resumed in September 1939, after which Ida Dehmel was required to remain in the Blankenese quarter of Hamburg, where she lived and where now she concentrated on reworking the final version of her (never published) autobiographical novel, "Daija". Through the intervention of her friend, Mary von Toll, with Prince Friedrich Christian of Schaumburg-Lippe, who had been working closely for many years with the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, she was permitted to remain at the "Dehmel House" and spared the indignity of being forced to wear a "Jew star" sewn onto her outer garments. Her outlook became progressively more threatening, although there were still many friends and acquaintances, both in Germany and from overseas, intervening with the authorities to try and keep her away from the looming holocaust, which it was becoming impossible to overlook. In October 1941 she wrote a letter to her friend Mary Stern: "You write me a beautiful letter, not knowing that in the meantime I have come close not simply to Death but also to Hell. Since Wednesday