Alice Licht

Three ordinary shoe brushes in a museum case, the kind of brushes whose soft swish I used hear every morning – my father ‘feeding the leather’ of his creased brown shoes.

The Reich needs brushes, the half-blind Otto Weidt insisted, thumping the table of a Berlin police station and I need my Jews to make them. Give me back my Jews.

With the help of his ally, the policeman, he got them back – those blind and deaf Jews and some he pretended were blind and deaf. He led them back in a long line like children holding hands, children released from a door in the mountainside, to Rosenthaler St., where they worked for two more years making brushes, binding brooms, in his small factory in the Höfe with its narrow rooms painted with pink and green borders, with its windowless room at the end where he hid a Jewish family.

And once he drove in his car to the gates of Auschwitz to sell brushes – as if any brush could clean a hell-floor – his purpose being to carry back

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