"Just a few days after Hitler invaded the country, the caretaker of the building where you lived handed you a bucket and a mop and said: 'Clean the stairs.' You wanted to go to your work, but you couldn't do anything else. It wasn't difficult physically, it was humiliating. I was surprised no one resisted, but I heard that if you tried to resist and called a police officer or a storm trooper, you were sent to a concentration camp where you were beaten up, no questions asked."
Memories from the first days of the Nazi regime in Austria (1938). Herbert Elliot, a young man in Vienna.