Transcript
Otto Leischnig “My dear Marthel! I hereby advise you, my dear mummy, that I am still in good health and spirits, and hope the same is true of you. What nice things have you been doing otherwise? Warm regards to our little Renatkins as well. Sending you, dear mummy, all my best, with as much love and loyalty as ever. Yours, Otto”
Narrator 1 It was Otto Leischnig, inmate 2670, who sent this letter. He wrote it to his wife Martha on 6 August 1939. It was returned to the Buchenwald concentration camp command headquarters two weeks later. The directorate of the Meusdorf women’s prison in Leipzig had not delivered it to its recipient. Martha Leischnig was also prohibited from receiving mail.
Narrator 2 “Enclosed please find a letter from the Buchenwald preventive custody inmate Otto Leischnig to his wife. Please be advised that said recipient is prohibited from sending or receiving … mail. She is a completely intransigent and fanatical Jehovah’s Witness.”
Narrator 1 Like his wife, Otto Leischnig had also belonged to this religious community for a long time. The self-employed master tailor from the Ore Mountains had already been in custody in the Sachsenburg concentration camp for two months when he was arrested once again. In February 1938 the Dresden Gestapo committed him to Buchenwald. Registered as a “recidivous Jehovah’s Witness”, he was initially assigned to the penal detachment. Inmates usually had to serve in that detachment for three to nine months.
Otto Leischnig “Luck seemed to smile on me; I was a tailor and tailors were urgently needed. So after a few weeks I was transferred to the SS tailors’ shop.”
Narrator 1 The Jehovah’s Witnesses were subject to particular abuse and harassment from the SS. From March 1938 onward, the members of the religious community were prohibited from all exchange of mail. After the ban was lifted in early 1939, the inmates were permitted to write once a month. However, they had to purchase special stationery from the SS and write their letters on that. The following memorandum was printed on the stationery and covered the entire sheet:
Narrator 2 “Buchenwald concentration camp command headquarters memorandum. The preventive custody inmate is still an obstinate Jehovah’s Witness and refuses to abstain from the false doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For this reason he has been prohibited only from cultivating the otherwise permissible correspondence.”
Narrator 1 A maximum of 25 words were allowed, which had to be squeezed into a small corner. But even these few lines did not reach Otto Leischnig’s wife in August 1939.
After 2 ½ years in the Leipzig prison, Martha Leischnig was committed to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. Heavy physical labour, frail health and worries about her underage daughter Renate weighed heavily on her. Finally Martha Leischnig signed the declaration that had been presented to her again and again. In 1942 she was released from Ravensbrück.
From then on, an SS guard illicitly delivered Otto Leischnig’s letters to his family. Renate copied out texts from the Bible and sent them to her father by that route.
Otto Leischnig was liberated in April 1945. In May the family was reunited in their native Pockau.
