Appendix II

Kristallnacht

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 10, 1938, I was walking to the S-Bahn station Jannowitzbrücke. The train would take me to the Berlin-Siemensstadt station, from where I could walk to the apprenticeship program I attended. I was fifteen years old.

As I took my seat, I looked out over the city. The train tracks were high up above street level, affording views over great distances above the city. As the train pulled out of the station, I noticed several columns of smoke rising from the city.

I didn’t think much about it, but when I arrived at the FLECK building, I noticed that none of my classmates had changed into their work uniforms. Instead, a heated discussion was taking place about reports from the newspapers and radios that a seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan had shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, the legation secretary at the German embassy in Paris.

The motive for the assassination was the recent expulsion of thousands of Jews of Polish extraction, Grynszpan’s family among them, by the Nazi government. Many of these people had lived in Germany for years. The Jews were taken by rail to the Polish border, where Gestapo guards attempted to force them to enter Poland. However, Polish border guards refused to allow them entry, trapping the Jews in a no-man’s-land between the two competing forces. They had no choice but to live there as best they could. When Herschel Grynszpan received a postcard from his sister detailing the family’s plight, he decided to take revenge by assassinating the highest-ranking German official he could find.

German newspapers and radio covered the story for days. Even though this was the single, isolated act of a grief-stricken teenager, the media was broadcasting the theme of “collective responsibility” for the killing. In other words, this was a murder for which all Jews were somehow equally responsible and should be equally punished.

My classmates were also debating the reasons behind the beating of Jews on the streets and the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. They were talking about how Jews were being attacked, mostly elderly men and men with beards. Many of my classmates had seen it happen, witnessing the fires and the destruction. It suddenly became clear to me what the columns of smoke meant. Buildings were burning.

Suddenly, the lead instructor, Kaminski, came out of his office, waving his arms and shouting, “Everybody quiet! I have just spoken with the head of the Jüdische Gemeinde and have been informed that the demonstrations against Jews and destruction of their property are continuing today. For our own protection, we should all go home till further notice.”

Within a few minutes, all of the students had scattered in different directions. I headed for the city, alternating between the S-Bahn, the U-Bahn, and walking. Something very unusual was taking place and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

I could not imagine that everything I heard was true, especially the burning of Berlin’s synagogues. My first stop was one of the larger synagogues in Berlin, the Fasanenstrasse synagogue. When I got there, the fires were still burning and the air was thick with smoke. A great portion of the building was already in ruins. Spectators filled the sidewalk on the far side of the street, watching the building burn. There were a few firemen who stood around with the rest, watching the fire burn, making no attempt to extinguish it.

As I mixed with the crowd, I overheard people say that the firemen were there to protect the building next to the synagogue, not the synagogue itself. The people watching seemed to enjoy seeing the fire and the destruction as if it were some kind of Roman circus put on for their amusement.

Mingling with the crowd were a number of brownshirted SA men, storm troopers. They were agitating the throng, urging action against the Jews, calling the burning of the synagogue “just the beginning.” I remember them making comments such as, “We must get rid of the Jews, they are our misfortune,” and similar nuggets.

When I had seen enough, I departed as unobtrusively as possible and made my way to the Prinzregentenstrasse synagogue, where the situation was similar but the crowd more hostile and unruly. I learned that a member of the synagogue and his family had died in the fire. There too, SA thugs incited the mobs that cheered the burnings. In all cases, it was taken for granted that members of the SA had set the fires.

In 1938, there were twelve major synagogues plus several other smaller ones in Berlin and hundreds of others throughout Germany. In Berlin, only three survived.

After getting my fill of watching the synagogues burn, I started to make my way home. On my way there, I was witness to further destruction of another kind. Large mobs of people were swarming around Jewish-owned department stores, smashing display windows, and looting the stores of all types of merchandise. I saw them carrying away furs, jewelry, silver, clothes, furniture, you name it. In the larger stores, the mobs would make their way up to the higher floors and toss the goods out the window, down to their waiting accomplices, who would collect them and carry them away.

In some of the stores, the SA and Hitler Youth led the way in smashing anything and everything in a ferocious orgy of vandalism. I saw a piano and other large items thrown out of an upstairs window just for the sheer love of destruction.

These events would become known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. But these calamities were not enough to satisfy the Nazi mania for Jew bashing. Two days later, on November 12, 1938, they also decreed a fine of one billion marks (about $400 million) to be paid by all German Jews collectively, as punishment for the death of vom Rath. In addition, repair and restoration of the buildings and businesses destroyed during the riots was commanded by the Nazis. These repairs were to be performed at the expense of the Jewish owners. If they had insurance and received compensation, the German government confiscated that money.

After Kristallnacht, it became obvious that emigration was absolutely and immediately necessary. My father and I stood in line at the Bolivian and then at the Chilean embassies, trying desperately to apply for a visa. The lines went around the block a few times as hundreds of people waited and hoped for a chance to leave the country. After waiting sometimes for days and nights, we discovered no more applications were being taken.

After Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, England and France declared war on Germany two days later. The Nazi government eventually blocked all emigration. No more Jews were allowed to leave.

The Nazis alleged that Kristallnacht was simply a spontaneous reaction of the Aryan people to Grynszpan’s crime. I did not know it at the time, but confidential Nazi documents recovered after the war showed that Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy chief of the Gestapo, had ordered that there be no interference with the burning of synagogues unless the fires endangered German property. This document proved that the entire uprising was a preplanned, organized event instituted by the Nazi government, not an impulsive act of the “Volk” (the people) as Hitler wished the rest of the world to believe.

Marc and Bev Lewyn at the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue.

Rebuilt Oranienburger Strasse synagogue, 1997.

Author in front of the building that formerly housed the Gustav Genschow Waffenfabrik (weapons factory).