building and used it until the few remaining Königsberg synagogues were banned. The Wieck family experienced the pain of parting with emigrating Jewish relatives and friends – most acutely when the Nazi regime in October 1941 began systematic deportations of German Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. However, because Wieck's parents were in a mixed marriage – Kurt Wieck had no known recent Jewish ancestors – they were spared deportation and ultimately genocide, unlike most members of Königsberg's Jewish community, which dated back four centuries. Although the Wiecks experienced isolated acts of kindness from a few non-Jewish neighbors, they were tormented by others, and life became more and more difficult for them as the war dragged on. In late August 1944, Königsberg was repeatedly fire-bombed by the British Royal Air Force, and much of the city's center, including the medieval castle and the 14th century Königsberg Cathedral, was destroyed, gutted or heavily damaged. "The people of Königsberg will never expunge these nights of terror from their memory," Wieck wrote later. When the Red Army, after a bitterly fought siege lasting nearly three months, conquered Königsberg on April 9, 1945 – one month before the end of World War II – the city had become a vast graveyard of rubble. Of the 316,000 people who lived there before the war, perhaps 100,000 remained, and Wieck estimated that about half of these were to die of hunger, disease, or maltreatment before the last Germans were allowed (or forced) to leave in 1949-50. The Soviet authorities declined to recognize the few surviving German Jews in Königsberg as victims of the Nazis, and initially treated all German-speakers as enemies. Wieck's incarceration in a Soviet prison camp near Königsberg-Rothenstein, and the story of how he and his parents barely managed to eke out an existence thereafter in Kaliningrad – as the city was renamed in July 1946 – occupy the second half of his book. In 1949, the Wiecks finally were allowed to go to the Soviet Zone of occupation in truncated and divided Germany. Wieck left the Soviet zone as soon as possible and lived first in West Berlin, where "Gentile" paternal relatives had survived. Thereafter he lived for seven years in New Zealand; he was an instructor in violin at the University of Auckland. On his return to Germany Wieck settled in Stuttgart. An accomplished violinist, he became first concert master of the