As a student, he belonged to several Jewish youth associations and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany.
On 24 May 1933 he was arrested on the basis of the Reichstag Fire Decree and imprisoned at Osthofen, one of the first Nazi concentration camps.
[2][3] With the aid of his fiancée and two other inmates, Philipp Wahl and Christoph Weitz,[4] he succeeded in escaping the camp on 3 July 1933.
[2] Tschornicki related his experiences as an exile in France to Anna Seghers, who used them in her novel Das siebte Kreuz,[3][6] written in 1938 and 1939.
It adapts texts by Seghers, Stéphane Hessel, Walter Benjamin and Wolf Biermann's translation of the Yiddish workers' song Sol sajn.