On October 25, 1941, the first train rolled from Hamburg to the Lodz Ghetto. The day before, about 1,000 Hamburg Jews, who were scheduled for deportation according to the transport list, had to report to the former lodge house on Moorweidenstraße. In the coming weeks (November 8 and 18; December 6, 1941) further transports to the “Eastern territories” were to follow. The author of this letter, the Hamburg Arabist Hedwig Klein, may have sensed the imminent danger of being deported herself. On November 2, 1941, she sent a letter to the Hamburg banker Dr. Rudolf Brinckmann, who had worked for the M. M. Warburg banking house since 1920. In 1933, this bank was a co-founder of the Palestine Trust Office for the Advising of German Jews (Paltreu) and oversaw the financial transfer of the assets of German Jews who emigrated to Palestine. In 1938, after the Warburg family itself had emigrated from Germany, Brinckmann had taken over the management of the bank. He had good contacts in Turkey, as he had studied Oriental languages in addition to law and national economics and had worked for Deutsche Bank in the former Constantinople until 1920. When Hedwig Klein wrote this letter she was 30 years old.