By the time Klein was composing the last of his Prague works, the occupied city retained but a shadow of its former splendour. There had been a large influx of Germans, street signs and many newspapers were now in German, shops were becoming depleted of goods and the Czech currency had become devalued. For Jews, their wages had been capped and, in any case, they found it almost impossible to find work, as self-employment for them was prohibited. In November 1940 Jews were instructed to hand over their bank-account passbooks and so, in order to try and recoup some cash, they began to rent out rooms in their homes. In a city where Jewish poverty was previously almost unknown, they were now eating charity food in soup kitchens, as more and more restrictions were placed on them. All this hardship was in addition to the prohibitions inflicted by the Nuremberg Laws.

By September 1941 Jews had to register officially with the authorities so that the occupying Germans could monitor Jewish demographics. Jews had fallen so low on the social ladder that when, shortly afterwards, the Germans announced the establishment of a so-called autonomous Jewish town at the former army garrison of Terezín, it seemed an attractive proposition. Zdenka Fantlová explained: ‘We got out a map to see in what direction Terezín lay from Prague. It didn't seem so horrible. If they evacuate us to that place, we pondered, we shall still be on Czechoslovak territory, still more or less home-based – just elsewhere, in a different town’. The historian Margalit Shlain has written: