Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-five-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schaudenfreunde that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazar in the town the following morning, taking several week's supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Michael Hulse (tr.), Vintage Books, London, 2002
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