PREWAR NAZI GERMANY
TEACHING LESSON 3
HANDOUT 3C
HENRY BEFORE AND AFTER KRISTALLNACHT

Exclusion Begins
The removal of Jews from professional life continued with the dismissal of my father from his job at the bank a year later. For a while, my father set himself up in the real estate business. But by now he was over fifty years old and non-Jews were unlikely to use a Jewish real estate agent. They knew he might not be able to hire a secretary or even rent an office. Neither of these events in themselves were catastrophic, but they show the slow, step-by-step restriction of our life space in the first five years of the Nazi regime. For some like my fatherland-loving father, this slow progression was never quite enough impetus to get out, until my mother took charge in 1938 and insisted that we try to do so.  

My own life soon changed greatly too. After a year in junior high, in the summer of 1937, after a soccer game in which I was the goalkeeper, my high school classmates bunched up to give me a beating. I escaped just in time. I would never return to school except to retrieve my books. By 1938 exclusion was formalized by government decree and shared by all Jewish children. The Jewish community hastily set up its own schools. Although understaffed, the school had highly motivated and able teachers. At this time in early 1938, the kids in our apartment complex also excluded me from playing with them and from one day to the next stopped speaking to me. It was frightening. They were my playmates.  

Father Taken Away on Kristallnacht
However, the event which marked the beginning of the end occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. On November 7, seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan had gone to the German Embassy in Paris and shot an assistant to the ambas-sador. The shot did not kill but only gravely wounded him. News of the incident was broadcast on German radio immediately with hourly updates. We suddenly realized that, in one way or another, my family and the rest of the Dresden Jewish community would face some kind of awful, unpredictable punishment if he died. We all prayed for his survival. But he did die and on the night of the ninth and again on the tenth, the Kristallnacht occurred, a supposedly spontaneous outburst of popular anger which was, in fact, ordered by Himmler’s second in command, Reinhardt Heydrich, with the approval of the top Nazi party and gov-ernment leaders. Remaining Jewish shops had their windows smashed and the Dresden synagogue was set afire. That night all over Dresden Jewish men we knew began to be arrested in their homes, pushed into police vans, and whisked away. Their families did not know what had happened to them or what to do.  

On the morning of the second day, the bell of our apartment rang at 7:30. I opened it and two men in civilian clothes stormed in, asked where my father was, and crashed into his bedroom. They found him standing in the middle of the room. My father asked if they were really going to take a decorated veteran of the Great War away. To make his point, my father turned from them to go to his desk to get out his medals. The smaller, meaner one of the two quickly drew his revolver and pointed it at my father and told him not to move and to raise his hands. I stood at the door petrified. They grabbed him, rushed him away so rapidly past where our coats hung that my father snatched the wrong coat, the lighter one of his two overcoats. They shoved him down the stairs so that he almost fell and we lost sight of him until we looked out the window and saw him being pushed into the police wagon.  

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USHMM: courtesy Robert A. Schmuhl Prisoners standing during a roll call in Buchenwald concentration camp, Germany, ca. 1940. Each man wears a striped hat and a uniform with colored triangular badges and identification numbers.

My father did not return until a month later. During that month, we had only one official, preprinted postcard from him in a shaky handwriting very different from his usual curved script. We learned he was being held in a concentra-tion camp called Buchen-wald. Slowly some of my parents’ friends were re-leased and although they had to swear not to speak about their experiences, they did. We learned that my father had caught pneumonia, partly because he had grabbed the wrong coat. We feared he might die.

In fact, he did survive. On the eighth of December just short of a month after being arrested, he came back, but he was a wreck. His head had been shaved and was covered by scabs. He was emaciated; he sank onto a kitchen chair and sobbed uncontrollably for a long time—something I had never seen him do. It would take him over a year to recover. By that time my parents and my half-brother were in Chile, South America. They were able to get a visa to Chile just before the outbreak of war. Up to 1941, the German policy was to rid the country of Jews, forcing them to leave everything behind, but not to exterminate them. The real problem was the refusal of other countries to open their doors to more than a limited number of those seeking to flee. My family used this visa three weeks after the war began to emigrate to Chile.  

Henry Escapes Germany on the Kindertransport

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USHMM: courtesy Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Jewish refugee children arrive in England on the first Kindertransport from Germany, Dec. 1938

I was not with them, because while my father was in Buchenwald, we received information that England and Holland had offered to accept Jewish children but not their parents, provided the Jewish communities of those countries guaran-teed their upkeep. My mother decided that I should be sent out but only to England. She sensed that a war by Germany against its neighbors was possible and that Holland was not a safe haven. And so in early January at age twelve, a month after my father had come home from Buchenwald, I tra-veled with my mother to Berlin where I joined Jewish children from other parts of Germany for a railway journey on a special train that became known as one of the Kin-dertransports. My mother and I loved each other dearly. We were both sad and anxious, but we also felt relief and optimism. Getting out of Germany was clearly the right thing to do after Kristallnacht.  

All the children on that transport ended up briefly in a holiday camp on the coast of the North Sea. It consisted of a set of light cabins constructed for summer use. They were very cold in mid-January. English families would come to select children to give them a home for as long as need be. However, I was not chosen by any of the families, so I ended up in a hostel for Jewish refugee children in London. There I could write and receive letters from my parents in Chile. In November 1940, after two months of being bombed every night, spending the night in the basement of the hostel, I was invited to live with a widower and his housekeeper, a family friend from Germany, in the city of Lincoln about 140 miles north of London. From that time on, life went upwards. During the war, I worked down in the coal mines. Then I attended and graduated from the London School of Economics. In 1948, I was able to visit my family for ten months in Chile.   From there, in the summer of 1949, I came to the United States and life really began.  

THEN AND NOW
After leaving Chile in 1949, Henry came to the United States to begin his graduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Henry and his wife came to North Carolina in 1968 after Henry was offered a position in the Depart-ment of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught at the university until his retirement in 1994.

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/