This novel opens with the town of Badenheim getting ready for the annual summer music festival with some average Jewish guests. The guests think they are going to Badenheim and relax and have fun like they normally do. There's only one problem with this idea, the Sanitation Department has other plans for these well to do Jewish guests. The Sanitation Department starts carrying out many inspections that ask random questions about the guests. The next thing is they request the registration from each one of the Jewish guests. .
" In the middle of May a modest announcement appeared on the notice board saying that all citizens who were Jews had to register with the Sanitation Department no later than the end of the month." (p.20).
What the guests didn't know was that when they registered, they were really signing their lives away. The registration was signing the Jews up so when they are bused back to Poland, they are killed. The problem was, if a person's great grandfather had some Jewish in him, then that person was counted as a Jew and they had to register. This was called the Form 101. It didn't matter if it was a great uncle or aunt, as long as there is Jewish in your family, you were going to Poland. This made the guests very mad.
"I"m sorry. Suddenly everything was taken away from me. They drove me here on the grounds that I"m a Jew. They must have meant the Ostjuden. And I"m like you, an Austrian. My forefathers? I don't know. Maybe who knows. What does it matter who my forefathers were?"(p.99).
None of the guest expected the worst. Everyone just went along with the Department because after all they were there on vacation and to have fun. It wasn't until the Sanitation Department began to but restrictions of where the guests could go. Some guests weren't allowed to leave the main hotel. And other guests wouldn't leave their rooms.
" Professor Fussholdt's young wife announced that something had changed in Badenheim.