THE NAZI STORM TROOPERS MARCHED onto the dark streets of Berlin, their swastika armbands hard to make out in the gloaming on Wednesday night, November 9. But with clubs and bats, they made their presence known, systematically smashing all the windows in the Jewish shopping district, and then in every neighborhood where Jews lived and worked. Jewish families watched silently from apartment windows, afraid to go out, but soon their homes were invaded as well, fathers and brothers dragged into the streets and beaten. The storm troopers were not alone in their organized attack. Mobs of Berliners joined in the beatings and the looting of businesses—furniture, leather goods, groceries, and clothing now exposed to the cool autumn air. The windows and mirrors of David’s and Jules’s fur shops were smashed with bricks and sledgehammers by their former friends and customers.
Jules’s Gestapo neighbor had been right. This had been planned, not just in Berlin, but all throughout Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
Tombstones were uprooted and graves violated, dozens of hospitals and schools destroyed. The New Synagogue, where Albert Einstein had once played the violin, was invaded by the Nazi mob, its Torah ark opened and desecrated, furniture smashed and piled up to start a fire, which, thankfully, was put out before the whole building and its golden dome burned.
But there were very few sirens that night amid the shouts and screams and the sounds of glass shattering. Police and firemen were ordered by the Gestapo to let the synagogues burn, to allow the storm troopers to pour their gasoline and light their matches. The flames lit the dark streets like holy bonfires, the smoke billowing for hours and clouding the city’s air. As night turned to day, the attacks continued. The window of an art supply store was smashed, its paints and brushes taken to help mark the walls of the destroyed shops with the words Jewish Pigs. A Jewish man in a black coat was stopped by a group of laughing storm troopers, who painted a white Star of David on his back and then punched him repeatedly, leaving him lying, bleeding in the street. He was just one of hundreds that night who were kicked to the curb and left for dead.
As the sun rose, Jewish men were made to line up in the streets and were marched off to God knows where, the first man in line forced to hold a large cardboard Star of David sign, wives and children shouting and crying after them, passersby laughing and jeering. Thousands, dressed in topcoats and hats, would be sent to the concentration camps Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, which was conveniently located just outside the city in a quiet suburb, tucked behind neatly kept houses. It was a short train ride away. Those Jews who remained in Berlin—including Edith’s parents—were forced to pay for the cleanup of the mess the Nazis had made.
Jules’s sister Golda and her son Paul were thrown into the street by their housekeeper, a young German farm girl, and her SS officer boyfriend, who looted their house of its jewelry, clothing, furs, and furniture. They smashed what they couldn’t take and broke all the windows. Golda’s business was looted and destroyed as well, the men’s suits stolen and distributed among the young Nazis. Escaping without even her purse, Golda stayed with one of her kinder employees until she and Paul could make it to Poland to meet Simon and Don, to what she assumed was safety.
Jules, Edith, and Hannelore drove all day to Rotterdam, where they stayed for a few days in a small hotel. They heard the news of Kristallnacht and talked about whether to turn around and go back to Berlin. But getting to America—and then sending for their family from there—seemed like the better plan.
They drove to the waterfront and left their car at the dock. It pained Jules to abandon his beloved Model A, but really, it was the least of his worries. On November 12, the day they left for America, the German government issued a decree barring Jews from operating retail stores. What would this mean for Edith’s family, and for Golda back in Berlin? Did Albert have enough money to keep the Nazis bribed and at bay?
Nauseous with worry, Jules and Edith hastily boarded the SS Veendam. The Holland America liner had partially sunk at the Hoboken docks ten years earlier after being rammed by another boat on a foggy night. But the Veendam was quickly repaired and its interior redesigned, eliminating many of its first-class cabins to transport a new surge of fleeing refugees. It was a far cry from the triple-stacked, Art Deco glory of the Queen Mary. That luxury had been reserved for Clark Gable’s agent.
Jules and Edith, her young daughter in her arms, stood at the railing and watched as the tugs push-pulled their ship out into the dark water of the harbor, the dock full of waving strangers growing smaller and smaller. Hannelore pressed her small face into her crying mother’s neck. Neither she nor Jules nor Edith waved to the crowd, since there was no one there they knew.
Their family members had already said their goodbyes.
On the Veendam’s previous voyage to America, a Jewish refugee from Austria had disappeared in the middle of the night after being despondent over leaving all her worldly possessions and a family member behind in a concentration camp. She had jumped overboard. In a photo taken at sea by Jules on his beloved Leica, Hannelore is smiling widely, but Edith looks depressed, no doubt thinking of all she, too, had left in her wake.
The Veendam, a third the size of the Queen Mary (four decks compared to the Queen’s twelve) and nowhere near as luxurious, was a sign of what was to come for Jules and Edith in their new, more Spartan life in America. Once in New York City, they crowded in with the Sternbergs for a few months until they could find an apartment of their own. Jules would take his wife and daughter from the Bronx down to Manhattan to Central Park, show them the bright lights of Broadway, and as he promised himself, would take Edith dancing at the Piccadilly ballroom once they were settled. But dancing was no longer as joyous as it once had been for Edith and Jules.
Mollie and David had settled on the Upper West Side in September, opening up their own fur shop, one of twenty-two furriers along Broadway between West Seventy-Second and Ninety-Sixth Streets. David eventually changed his last name to Payne—a loose translation of Schmerz. Pain. Payne. To break out from the pack and establish his own clientele, Jules headed crosstown to the Upper East Side to live and open his business. For Passover and the other holidays, they would go west to Mollie’s place. But the Upper East Side was now Jules’s domain. Their new neighborhood, Yorkville, was filled with Germans. It was so German, in fact, that a stretch of East Eighty-Sixth Street was known as “Sauerkraut Boulevard” and would be the scene of a Nazi parade in 1939.
Though his fellow Germans wanted him dead, Jules still identified strongly as a Berliner. He continued to read copies of the German American newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, which was sold at corner newsstands, and ate at German restaurants like the Heidelberg, which served schnitzel, sauerbraten, and Dinkelacker. Yorkville was the very same neighborhood where Billy Wilder’s mother, Eugenia, had lived three decades before as a young woman. It’s where she had stayed with her jeweler uncle and his wife, strolling its gaslit streets at night and eating at those very same German restaurants, where she had dreamed of a permanent life in New York City.
Jules was reinventing himself yet again on those streets. His first shop—and railroad apartment—was tiny compared to their sprawling place in Berlin, on the second floor of a building on Lexington and Ninety-First, above a French dry cleaner and next to the Ninety-Second Street YMHA, the biggest Jewish community center in the country. Jules, Edith, and the baby lived in a couple of cramped rooms behind the shop, making the “commute” easy for them. The place was so narrow it resembled a bowling alley. They were so poor Edith would buy day-old bread from the bakery. But Jules and Edith worked hard, sewing furs into the night. They worked twelve hours a day, not just to make their business succeed, but to forget what and whom they had abandoned in Berlin.
What Jules missed most, besides his siblings, was having a car. He and Edith couldn’t afford one, so he bought Hannelore a toy car, a green metal windup Kommando Anno 2000. It wasn’t just any car but an exact double of the green car on the cover of the first issue of Action Comics, the car Superman had held up over his head. No one knows if Jules bought it because of the celebrated cover published by the man who had helped save them, or if it was just one of life’s strange coincidences, one that you would miss if you weren’t paying close enough attention. Jules showed Hannelore how to use the small key to wind the car up and send it on its way across the worn wooden floorboards of their new home. In America.