Kristallnacht 75th Anniversary

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Frieburg Synagogue /Alice GoldsteinOn November 9 of this year, we commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. The event marked a crescendo in the ever-escalating abuse of Germany’s Jews that had been underway for the previous five years, ever since the Nazis came to power. Jews had been successfully isolated socially, broken economically and removed from the body politic by being declared no longer citizens of Germany. Most legal, cultural and social institutions had gradually become off limits. Even public schools were no longer available for Jewish children. That is why I, as a seven-year-old, was not at home when the pogroms of Kristallnacht occurred. I was living with my maternal grandparents in Freiburg, a city not far from my home village of Kenzingen. But I have vivid recollections of the time and have heard what happened in Kenzingen that night and the following day.

My family had been living in Germany since the middle of the eighteenth century and my great grandfather established a dry goods store in Kenzingen in the middle of the nineteenth century. It flourished in the village environment and provided a comfortable living. The family was fully integrated into village activities even while remaining fully observant Jews, and my father and his brothers were an active part of the social and athletic life of their cohort. My mother, brought up in the nearby city of Freiburg, brought a breath of urban culture to the village and was greatly appreciated for her piano playing and good cooking. The good life our family had in Kenzingen was sharply curtailed once Hitler came to power. The event of Kristallnacht heightened the urgency they felt to leave Germany.

The pogroms of November 9, 1938 were carefully and centrally orchestrated at the highest echelons of the Nazi government. At given orders, hundreds of synagogues all over Germany were vandalized and burned. The beautiful Freiburg synagogue went up in flames. The next day my Opa Valfer (grandfather) disappeared from our household. Jewish schools were abruptly closed. In a few days, my Mama came to take me home to Kenzingen, where our store was boarded up, and both my Papa and Opa Dreifuss were missing. Decades later I learned the story of Kristallnacht in Kenzingen.

All during the day of November 9, school children were mobilized to march in the village streets, singing nationalistic and anti-Semitic songs. Teachers all wore their swastika armbands; Hitler Youth appeared in uniform. Blood-red flags with the black swastika hung from every possible window. Tension rose with each turn of the marching children and Hitler Youth through the narrow streets. My parents and grandparents, who lived in apartments above our store, could only bolt the door, close the shutters and hope that people would forget that they were huddled inside the house. No one stopped by to offer a word of comfort or encouragement.

That evening, a group of men, ostensibly from the surrounding area, were organized by the Gestapo, plied with liquor, and marched into Kenzingen. There, they zeroed in on the only Jewish-owned shop in town – ours, broke the glass window and looted the store. Although a three-year boycott had left the store with pitifully few goods, these were piled in a heap in the street. The men then went up to the third floor – my parents’ apartment – and gathered all the books and piano sheet music they could find. They threw them out the window and piled them in a heap on top of the merchandise. Then they set fire to the entire mound and kept the flames going through much of the night, while my terrorized parents and grandparents huddled helplessly in their home.

The next day, the Gestapo arrived in Kenzingen in open lorries. They went to each of the three houses in Kenzingen where Jews lived and arrested all the males age 16 and over. At the time, my Opa Dreifuss was out of the house, taking his usual morning walk in the countryside. Farmers told him that the police were looking for him so, not wishing to get the family into trouble, he hurried back home. He arrived just in time to take off his walking shoes and change into slippers before the Gestapo arrived.

He and my Papa, like Jews all over southwestern Germany, were transported to the Dachau Concentration Camp. Many, like my relatives, were taken in open trucks, in plain sight of their neighbors. None in Kenzingen tried to stop the trucks or protest the deportation. My grandfathers were released from Dachau within a week because they were elderly. My father was forced to remain longer, until my mother could convince the Gestapo that we were trying to leave Germany as soon as possible, thus helping to make Germany Judenrein (clean of Jews). He returned home much thinner, and without even a fringe of hair on his head. His other souvenir of those traumatizing weeks was his yellow star (pictured).

The silent acquiescence to Kristallnacht of most Germans was echoed by the world. A few headlines and newspaper articles in the world press and a few diplomatic protests were the general reaction. The only foreign ambassador to be recalled by any of the major powers was the one from the United States. Few remarked on the thoroughness with which the pogroms had been carried out or on the fact that they reached even the tiniest villages where Jews lived. Hitler saw the reaction as carte blanche for continued and escalated atrocities against Jews and other minorities. As we remember those monstrous times, it is that silence that can teach us the most valuable lesson.

Editor’s note: Alice Dreifuss Goldstein was born in Kenzingen, a small town in southwestern Germany, near the French border. The family eventually was able to escape to the United States in August 1939. Alice’s story is more fully told in her book, “Ordinary People, Turbulent Times,” published by Author House. She has lived in Rhode Island with her husband and children since 1955.