In the first of these letters, dated 28th February 1940, Felix gives an account of the German occupation of Danzig and the outbreak of hostilities.

As an 18-year-old, Felix was living with his parents and his four-year-old brother, when he noticed that the town was filling with German-speaking men. He deduced that they were soldiers in civilian clothes. Later, they were visible as uniformed SS troops, to be joined in number by other military.

While Hitler was still proposing peace, Danzig was sealed off. German warships arrived, and hostilities started. After a day-long bombardment, the local Polish resistance was broken, and Felix found himself living under military occupation. He was selected for evacuation to Palestine - a journey that would take him first to the Danube, at Kladovo in Yugoslavia, on the border with Romania, where he would embark on a small steamer. It was from there that he wrote his letters to Alex in London.

His first letter ends with Felix's painful description of him leaving his family. The idea was that his parents and his small brother would go to Brazil and Felix would join them later. Their visas were already available at the consulate but the trouble was, the "German devil Gestapo" were making things difficult. So, Felix was obliged to leave his family in a terrible state of uncertainty.

After arriving in Kladovo, Felix received news from home that all Jews had to be out of the country within two months, otherwise they would be sent to former Polish countries where they would "suffer terribly". The Jews were being treated like stray dogs, for which Felix avowed revenge.

Receiving this news, Alex responded by offering to get his friend's descriptive accounts published in the British press, and Felix welcomed the idea, not so much because he wanted the world to know what was going on but because by the time he received Alex's offer, Felix had been living for four and a half months with no money!

In his second letter, dated 7th April 1940, Felix describes how he was still stranded in Kladovo, one of some 1,200 transportees "pressed like herring" into three small steamers, where they had lived for weeks. There was so little room that people had to remain standing while eating, and there were often tense squabbles over places to sit and sleep. Felix felt himself lucky because he had found himself a little place to sleep beneath a table.