1926
Jutta is born in Hamburg, Germany.
1933
The Nazi Party, let by Adolf Hitler, takes power in Germany. The new government adopts anti-Jewish laws and creates the first concentration camp, Dachau, near the city of Munich. One of the earliest anti-Jewish measures is the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools, which aims to exclude Jews from public schools.
1934
Jutta leaves public school to enroll in the Jewish School for Girls.
1935
The German government enacts the Nuremberg Laws. These laws and others adopted in subsequent years exclude Jews from virtually all aspects of the nation’s life.
1936
Germany hosts the Olympic Games. While in the international spotlight, the Nazi government softens some of its anti-Jewish pronouncements.
1937
Jutta’s father, Isaac Salzberg, is forced to shut down his business because he is Jewish.
1938
MARCH: German troops enter neighboring Austria. The country becomes a part of Germany in a takeover known as the Anschluss. Austria’s Jews are immediately subject to anti-Jewish laws, as well as to degrading treatment and street violence.
JUNE: Nazi police conduct mass arrests of Jews throughout Germany. Many of those arrested are imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp, near the city of Weimar.
JULY: Representatives of thirty-two nations gather in the resort town of Evian, France, to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees seeking to flee Nazi persecution. The Evian Conference produces no tangible results, as the nations decline to loosen the immigration restrictions that prevent the refugees from entering their countries.
OCTOBER 28: Nazi police raid homes throughout Germany, rounding up thousands of Ostjuden (Jews from east), particulary Jews from Poland, and sending them to the German-Polish border.
NOVEMBER 7: Jutta and her family leave Germany on a midnight train. They arrive in Paris, France the following morning.
In Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager from Hanover, Germany, assassinates Ernst vom Rath, a German official.
NOVEMBER 9–10: German citizens attack Jewish shops, Jewish people, and synagogues throughout Germany. The attackers are spurred on by news of the vom Rath assassination. The event becomes known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), or the November Pogrom. Similar attacks and destruction occur in Austria.
NOVEMBER 12: Jutta and her family depart France on board the Queen Mary, a British ocean liner.
On the French-German border, hundreds of Jews attempting to flee Germany are turned back by French officials.
NOVEMBER 17: Jutta and her family arrive in New York.
1939
Germany invades Poland on September 1. World War II begins.
