As for myself, I was arrested by the Belgians the day the Germans marched into Belgium, i.e., May 10th, 1940.  As the latter advanced we were transferred to the French authorities on May 14th and held in French Concentration Camps ever since.  I have been in the Camps of Le Vijean and just before the Germans advanced there, sent to the Camp of St. Cyprien on the Mediterranean near the Pyrenees of Spanish ill repute, and from there ultimately transferred to the worst Camp in France: Gurs, in the Pyrenees, where conditions were so primitive, so horrible that even very mild descriptions of the actual conditions in the American press shocked and bewildered people over here.  And there are still 15,000 men, women and children held there in that Camp alone.

I got out finally on February 1st, 1941, after a non-quota immigration visa had been anew procured by Cora [Cora Germer] as long ago as September last, but the French only gave me permission to go to Marseille to see the Consul four months after he had asked me to call urgently for the visa.  It's just their complete incapacity for doing anything, for making progress, for organization, that made it impossible to obtain the permit before, despite all kinds of urgent steps that were undertaken by Cora, others and myself with the various French authorities and the American Ambassador and Consul.  We in the Camps have come to understand thoroughly the basic reasons for the rapid break-up of French resistance both militarily and administratively.  Most, 95% of the prisoners in the Camps were Jews, all violently hostile to the Nazis, violently friendly to the French, many offering spontaneously to fight on their sides actively, who have now more or less become hostile to the French, due to the unsanitary conditions in the Camps, the dirt, the ridiculously poor food, causing scurvy, various diseases, the unhealthy water, and their incapacity and unwillingness to improve conditions until at long last attacks in the American Press—based on reports smuggled out by devious and dangerous means—forced the French to pretend to do something.  Believe me, I am glad to be out of that hell.  Fortunately, my health and general conditions do not seem to have suffered very much, and that is really a miracle which the French did their best to defeat.

If we had been prisoners of war, if we had been enemies of the French, if we had been young and vigorous, if we had been nothing but men, if we had shown the least sign of revolt on occasion—one could perhaps excuse the French.  But most of us were over forty (up to 70), several thousands were women (of whom perhaps 35% over 65 and up to 95 years of age), 10% children and babies.  And yet all those atrocities.  There is no reasonable excuse or even explanation.  No wonder that the death rate was horrible and that the blind sympathy for the French and their cause in those Camps has turned to the complete opposite.

As regards things in California, I was under the impression from a report by A.C. some two years ago, that you had definitely established a farm in some valley—not having access to my files and books, which have remained behind and are somewhere in Belgium—I cannot check up on anything. But I am sorry that all those plans have dropped into the water. Let me know what actual and active positive work is being done there now—I am sorry too that Max Schneider has severed relations with all of you. It had all sounded so promising some years ago. Can't you procure his address for me? I just must get in touch with him.

Well, Jane, I am glad that I was successful in locating you and that you personally seem still to be fit as a fiddle. It seems such a long time since when I saw you last.

Give my love to all and I hope to be seeing you some day. I wonder whether we will be able to fix something up for A.C. to come over as long as the going is possible. I personally do not think though, that the Germans will actually be able to land in Great Britain. Still one can never know.

All the best.

Fraternally,

Karl