Survivors Remember Kristallnacht

On the night of my mother’s birthday, it was November, the eve of November the 10th, and my brother and I were very excited about my mother’s birthday coming up. And we went to sleep in our bedroom and I think it must have been maybe 11, or maybe a little bit later than 11 o’clock at night. All of a sudden some bricks and rocks were being thrown through our window and my brother was always braver than me. He was a year younger, but he was braver. And I was hiding under the blanket. And he went to the window to check to see what was going on. And he told me that it was the people in... our neighbors. The people of our town were throwing the bricks and rocks through the window. And he also told me that the civil policeman in our town was standing on the edge of the crowd and he didn’t do anything about it. So we became very frightened and we started to go across the hall to our, to our parents’ bedroom.

Now while we were crossing the hall... our front door is at the end of the hall. Some of the people had uprooted a telephone pole and they smashed the front door down, which was made out of this beautiful colored glass. And they smashed it down and they came running through the hallway and they were running to go upstairs to the second floor. Now in the meantime, we went to our parents’ bedroom where they were sleeping. And they... we asked them, “What’s happening?” And again, they didn’t want us to worry. They said, “Well, we don’t know what’s happening right now, but for now we will hide in the attic of our building.”

We lived on the first floor and the teacher of our town lived on... in that room next to us. And then on the second floor lived the rabbi. And that’s what those townspeople were doing with that telephone pole. They wanted to go through our apartment to get to the second floor to get to the rabbi. And on the third floor lived a non-Jewish family and then on the fourth floor was the attic. So that’s what we did. We went up to the attic and there we met the family of the rabbi who was already up there. Now the rabbi wasn’t there and we wanted to know what had happened to him. And so I looked through this little window of the attic and I saw the rabbi standing on his veranda. And there were two, I guess they were SS men, they were holding him by the arm. And another one came along with some kind of a scissors or implement, I don’t remember, and he held it and cut off his beard. And then later on, I found out that he was hauled off to jail. And my father was sent to jail also, but he came back during the night, maybe after the first night. Now they released him from jail and I still do not know whether he was released from jail because he used to play chess with the chief of police, or because he had... he was born in Poland and he had Polish citizenship.

And our apartment was, not ransacked too badly, but a lot of our furniture was broken and a lot of things were missing. But it... you could still live in it. However the rabbi’s apartment, when they people had rushed up there during my mother... the eve of my mother’s birthday, they burned all of his books. He had this beautiful library and they got torn and burned and his furniture was really destroyed. And the people who were on the third floor, they pretended they didn’t know anything was happening.

After the Night of the Broken Glass everybody in Germany wanted to leave. I mean I think maybe that was the objective of the Nazis, to try and get everybody out. And of course by this time, my father wanted to leave too. But it was very difficult. You couldn’t... you couldn’t get any affidavits. We did have some relatives that were living here in the United States and they were working very hard to get my father and my mother to come to the United States. But it wasn’t happening. So my father had heard... he wanted his children to be safe most of all. So my father had heard of this lady who was taking children across the border into France. She did it for a fee. She did not do that because she was a kind-hearted woman. She did it because she was going to make money out of this deal. So all of the money that my father had saved that I had up in that attic, he gave it to her just so that she would bring us to safety to France.

The lady had explained to us that we had to pretend to be her children and then she had provided the passports for us to get across the border into France. And I don’t know how she did it, but she had everything looking very official with my brother’s picture in his passport and mine. And so the night came that we were going to get separated from our parents. And my mother and father tried to be cheerful and I really didn’t understand that they might have known in the back of their heads that they might never see us my brother and me again.

I want people to understand that if they see injustice at the beginning, if we can do something the minute we see injustice, and not be bystanders and not do like, like the people who lived on the third floor and do like that people that were throwing the bricks and rocks through the window and the policemen who went along with some of the rules that the Nazis had. If we stop this at the beginning, well such horrors as the ghettos and the concentration camps would never happen.