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School

His mother was determined that he be schooled in German and enrolled him in the local German-language Volksschule. He skipped the first year because he could already read and write. In 1929 his father's building materials business failed and the family moving to Berlin where his mother's brothers helped them. The next year Marcel started at the de:Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium in Berlin-Schöneberg near their home. In 1935 the school closed because so many of the Jewish families which favoured the liberal school could either no longer afford the fees or had emigrated, and Marcel moved to the Fichte Gymnasium (now the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Grundschule) in Berlin-Wilmersdorf (a school "whose name was mentioned with respectfully raised eye-brows" - Joachim Fest) where he completed his Abitur in 1938. He considered he had been well treated at school. Some teachers were Nazis but that didn't affect how they taught him. His fellow pupils mostly supported the new Germany but, as he always thought, associated the anti-jewish propaganda of the day with an abstract "world Jewry", not with the fellow pupils they had known for years. Nevertheless, Jewish pupils were excluded from school celebrations and excursions, and from about 1935 socialised less and less with their non-Jewish classmates.

His mother had given him his first theater ticket, for William Tell, when he was 12 and after this experience he began to read the classics voraciously, all Schiller's plays, most of Shakespeare, Kleist, Büchner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Stendhal, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Maupassant, and so on. He found time, he claimed, by only doing sufficient homework for a "satisfactory". Books were easy to come by: He was a member of two public libraries, emigrating Jews abandoned most of their books, and his uncles had well-stocked libraries which he was able to exploit.

Babysitting his young cousin Frank Auerbach and running errands for his uncles brought him pocket-money which he used not for books but for theater and opera tickets, managing two to three productions a month at a time which saw, with Gustav Gründgens and Heinz Hilpert, a flowering of German theater in Berlin. He also listened a lot to music, mostly on gramophone records and the radio.

After his abitur he applied for a place at the Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University) but was, as he expected, as a Jew rejected. Several years earlier, as money became tighter, his father and brother had returned to Poland, to Warsaw. Now his mother also returned, and his sister and her husband were on their way to England. He took a furnished room and worked for a few weeks as a trainee in an office before, in October 1938, without warning, he was deported to Poland in the first mass deportation of Jews.

War

Reich-ranicki lived with his parents and brother in Warsaw, earning a little by giving Germans lessons but otherwise unemployed, supported by his dentist brother, reading, and improving his Polish, When war broke in September 1939 he and his brother fled eastwards, so avoiding the fighting in Warsaw, but, hearing of the fall of Warsaw, quickly returned. Their parents had survived but their apartment had been badly damaged.

The Germans quickly started to make Jewish life difficult. German soldiers amused themselves by publicly humiliating, degrading, and sometimes shooting Jews on a whim. Jews had to wear identifying armbands, a Jewish quarter was established, later to become the Ghetto, and special, reduced, rations were introduced.

A Jewish council, the Judenrat, was set up to administer the Jewish quarter and they needed German speakers. Reich-Ranicki applied and was taken on. Because of his perfect German he was quickly promoted to run the Judenrat's translation and correspondence office. All communication between the Judenrat and the Germans went through his hands. Also, he now had a monthly salary and so could contribute to his parent's upkeep.

In January 1940 a neighbour, distressed by his humiliation by the Germans, hanged himself. Reich-Ranicki was told by his mother to look after the man's daughter Teofila, called Tosia. She would become his wife.