Survivors Remember Kristallnacht

How did I become aware of Kristallnacht, whether something had happened? Well, this is not the era of television, radio etc, etc. And as every other morning, I got ready to go to school and the school was not all that far from our home. And I guess I had just sort of gained that little bit of independence of being allowed to go to school on my own rather than to be taken every day by my mother. I walked by our synagogue. Hordes of people were standing in front of it and throwing stones through the beautiful stained-glass windows. I think that they had gone into the synagogue and ransacked it on the inside. They threw Torah scrolls into the streets. And as soon as I got into the school, teacher sat us down and she said, “Something terrible has happened overnight. And your parents have been alerted to this and they will come to pick you up.” My mother came very shortly after we came to school and she took me to my grandmother’s home. My grandmother lived on the Grindelalle which was closer to the school than Park Alle where we lived. And my father was there already and my grandfather, as I have said before, had passed away. So it was only one of my aunts who was still in Germany - let’s just say unmarried sister of my mother - and my grandmother. And she had a very large apartment and my father was there and so were two other gentlemen. One was a friend of my aunt and uncle, a dentist, and the other gentleman, I don’t know, he was a friend of the family. And the reason I said she had a very large apartment, it really ran from one side of the house to the next and the bedrooms were in the back. And these three gentlemen were staying in that bedroom all the way in the back. We didn’t quite know what was happening. My father always was very courageous man and you weren’t going to tell him that he cannot walk on the streets of Germany. And he went downtown, and I remember him coming back quite shaken up.

We went home. We did not make light in the apartment and we went to bed immediately. And in the middle of the night, they came pounding on the front door. I remember that. And the fear that this instills in the child is a feeling of fear that never in your life can you forget. That feeling of fear is always there. And evidently -- we never knew... never came to know this for sure -- the next door neighbor opened her door finally and said, “Why are you making so much noise? People are sleeping?” And they said, “Well, we want these Jews.” And she said, “They are not home.” So they left. Did she know that we were home and she really didn’t want us to be arrested and taken away? Or, did she really think we weren’t home and so on. We never found that out. But certainly her remark saved us from that. Then we went to my grandmother’s house and stayed there for the remainder of the week which was how long that pogrom lasted. And my father was in the forest in Blankenese for that time.

When we Jews talk about the Torah scrolls, this is the basis of our belief. This is the basis of our observance. This is the basis of our lives. This was thrown into the streets. It was torn up. It was desecrated by hordes of people who had absolutely lost all respect of any other people’s religion. It works itself right into the fact that you hate for the sake of hating, but you really don’t know why you are hating.