Survivors Remember Kristallnacht

INGE:
Not having a Jewish school in the small town that we lived in, I had to travel to Cologne, where there was a Jewish school. It was maybe a half hour, 45 minute ride. I remember the day of Kristallnacht, my mother also send me to school because things in the smaller areas were not as active early in the day as they had been in the larger towns. And when we got to school, two SS or SA, I don’t remember who, but brown shirt men with German shepherds holding on to them and the shepherds were wearing muzzles, were standing in front of the school. And we could see, if we looked at the yard, that some of the desks were in the yard and we could look up into the side where the synagogue was, and that was... the roof was all burned out. And the man said, “There’s no school for you today. Go home.” What child isn’t happy when he’s told to go home? So, we went home. I went home alone. And in those days, the railroad went in front of our house. And I stood on the railroad platform and my mother happened to be looking out the window and I waved to her. And she was horrified to see me. Well, I got to the station. I walked home and they said, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “They told us to go home, so I came home.” And that is when I realized that something really very bad had happened. Didn’t know what, didn’t understand what was going on. I told them that I saw that the synagogue had burned. And everybody was upset. It must have been around noontime by then.

JILL:
I remember being... sitting in the living room, in the middle of the week, which was unusual. And I remember my grandmother sitting in front of me to the left. And someone knocked on the door, and told my father that he and his brother and my grandfather should not go to the synagogue that day because something terrible was coming down. Well, they closed the door and they wondered what was happening. And my father started making some phone calls and he found out that some of the relatives in München-Gladbach, Krefeld, and other cities were already horrified and terrified that people were going to come and destroy their houses. And there was a lot of screaming in the house. My father was screaming. He got hysterically frightened and my uncle was screaming. My uncle wanted to close the shutters. He always did that and that was part of withdrawing into your home and leaving the outside world outside. And my grandmother said to him, “Stop that. It’s too late. That’s not going to protect us.” And she said, “We’re running away.”

INGE:
My father hired a driver, and my grandmother and grandfather and my sister and I were put in a car and we were told we were going to Cologne. I remember that my grandmother, who had a broken leg, put her broken leg on my head to keep us down -- my sister and I -- down in the bottom of the car so we wouldn’t be able to see what was going on outside and that nobody else would be able to see that we were in the car. And we went to Cologne. And my mother had three uncles and an aunt that lived in an apartment there. And I think it was a two bedroom apartment. And three of us, my other grandmother... about six, seven people rained in on them that night. And they put us up. We slept wherever we could and we stayed there for nine months.

JILL:
We really didn’t know what was happening in Lechenich until after my mother was called back. There was a behfel - you know - an order for all the Jews to pay and to go back to their houses and repair them. Repair the damage that was done on Kristallnacht, so my mother had to do that. It was so dreadful when my mother went into the house. It wasn’t enough to steal, but whatever they didn’t steal they had to destroy. Our baby pictures that were hanging on the walls were stabbed with scissors, the glass broken and the scissors jabbed into the baby pictures. That told us something. All the prayer books, anything with a religious content was taken to the attic - it was a four story house - and dumped into the compost. I still have somewhere in the house one prayer book with egg and compost, manure on it. The toilets were ripped out of the walls. There was nothing left whole. It was dreadful.

INGE:
I don’t think my mother had to tell us anything about going to Africa. If you were a child in this house, you heard all the talk and all the conversations of what was going on and who was going where and what we were going to do. I know what I was thinking. If we went to Africa all together, we’d have hopefully some kind of family life again. But I don’t think I was able to express it at that time.

JILL:
The only thing we can contribute is our memories and to tell of how we were persecuted, simply because of the faith and because a group of criminals decided that Judaism was not the faith but a race and decided that the whole race had to be destroyed because of that faith. It was a war against God, and the Jewish people became the instrument. And God knows whatever plan may happen in the future who the instrument would be.