Kristallnacht – Part One

To mark Armistice Day, Vulpes Libris asked Renate Benedict – mother of regular reviewer Jay and a popular guest in her own right – if she would consider sharing a little more of her amazing life history.

Although she hopes, one day, to write the story herself, she agreed to tell us a little of it, and today we are honoured to carry the first part of an extraordinary and very personal two-part interview …

The beautiful and powerful images which accompany Renate’s memories are the work of artist Aaron Morgan and reproduced with his kind permission.  His website can visited HERE.   The painting on the left is entitled “Kristallnacht” and  I can do no better than to allow Aaron himself to explain the significance of the night of the 9th/10th of November 1938 …

“Kristallnacht – the “Night of Broken Glass”  took place throughout Germany and Austria on the night of November 9-10, 1938. Prior to Kristallnacht, Nazi police took precautions to ensure that Jews could not fight back effectively. On November 8th, police entered Jewish households, removing anything that Jews could use to defend themselves. In the course of just a few hours on November 9th, hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish owned places of business were destroyed, almost one hundred Jews were killed, and thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The Kristallnacht prisoners who were released were forced to emigrate immediately, to have their properties “Aryanized,” or both. The shards of broken window glass seen in front of Jewish owned stores all over Germany the next morning gave this event its name.”

Renate is, of course, the copyright owner of everything that follows.  No part or parts of the interview may be reproduced anywhere without her express permission.

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VL:  Before you arrived in California at the end of 1938, you and your Mother and Father, and sister Annette, lived a very comfortable life in Germany, didn’t you?

RB:  Yes.  My father Walter was a well-respected and very influential attorney in our wonderful little town of Hann Munden, Lower Saxony.  He’d been awarded the Iron Cross by the Kaiser.  And my mother – for her part – had for many years been helping the poor of the town with food and clothing – and encouraging other well-off people to do the same.  But my Father was Jewish, and although his social position gave him – and us – a certain amount of protection, by 1937 things were changing.  My sister and I were not allowed to join any of the new clubs for the ‘perfect’ German girls and we started to feel undesirable.  Sometimes boys threw stones at us, and called us ‘dirty Jews’.  It became obvious that the time had come for us to go.

And so it was that my Mother went to Berlin to arrange exit visas for us all – to join her her sister in California.

VL:  And that was in early November, 1938?

RB:  It was.  On the afternoon of the 9th of November, my sister and I had gone to Kassel for our piano lesson, and coming back on the train I noticed that the young men travelling with us were behaving – how should I put it?  In a very undesirable way.  They were very ‘loud’ … and I felt that they knew something – some terrible secret -  that I didn’t.  It was very scary – but I didn’t mention it to my sister, or anyone else.

That evening, we had no servants in the house, but our supper had been laid out for us.  As we sat at the table – my Father, my sister, and I – I looked up at one of my Mother’s precious Ming vases, perched on a small shelf – and I suddenly had a mental image of it shattered into a thousand pieces.  I thought,  “We really should  protect some of these things” – but where that thought came from, I have no idea.  My sister didn’t seem to share my unease – so again, I said nothing.

That night, just before we went upstairs to bed, my Father said:

“By the way, if you hear the doorbell ringing during the night, don’t get up to answer it.”

VL: He knew …

RB: It gave me a terrible, ominous feeling, and I so wished that my cheerful Mother was with us. I was just twelve at the time (my sister was two years older) and wanted to share my thoughts and fears with her.

I woke at 5am the next morning, with a huge sigh of relief, and I thought “Oh good, they didn’t come” – without even knowing who ‘they’ were.  But hardly had I had this thought than the doorbell rang – sounding all through the house.  It’s  a sound I shall never forget.  It was the sound of the end of all good things – and for so many years …

The next sound was of our front door being hacked to pieces – and then we heard men entering the house – storming in with their axes, destroying the furniture, smashing the glass and china and porcelain…  It was absolutely terrifying, and my sister and I jumped out of bed.  She immediately said that we should hide in our big stand-up wardrobe, but for some reason I pulled her out of it and we went instead  to our Father’s rooms.  He was just standing there, with no idea of what to do either …

I announced that I was going up to our old hiding place under the eaves, where we used to play – so I took Annette up to the little guest bedroom on the 3rd floor – where she ran to the window and just started to scream at the top of her lungs .  I dragged her back and under the roof, where we crawled on our bellies under the eaves.

From there, we could hear them looking for us.  We could hear slamming doors and voices saying, “Here!  I think they’re up here!”

But they didn’t come, and they didn’t come, and we sat there praying to God as we had never prayed before: “Please, dear God …”

Then, quiet descended – and we heard them singing rude songs about dirty Jews as they went down the hill.  We waited until silence had completely returned and then, slowly and carefully, we crept downstairs, picking our way through broken jampots in our bare feet.  When we finally got to our Father’s room, he was standing there in his white underclothes.  He said to us that he had already telegraphed our Mother in Berlin and that she would be coming back on the 8.30 train that evening.  He said that we must go around to our neighbour, Fraü Nolte – because a car was coming to pick him up in 20 minutes.  I can’t remember where they said he was being taken, but I think they said “For safety”.

He dressed, put on his hat and coat and they came and took him away.

My sister and I tried to dress – but it was hard because our bedroom had been destroyed and our stand-up wardrobe -

VL:  The one Annette wanted to hide in?

RB:  Yes.  It was lying across our beds, with axe marks in the back.  I wondered, briefly, what would have happened if we’d been inside it . . . Anyway, we went around to the Noltes’ as my Father had told us and around 11.00 in the mornng – my sister and I shivering from fear and shock – we heard a truck pull up outside and some people going into our property – to the stable where our pet lamb, Lammy, was.  We heard him bleating and ran around to our home as fast as our legs would take us, to rescue our precious sweetheart.  When we got there, they’d tied a rope around his neck and some men were dragging him into the back of the waiting truck.  We threw our arms around his little neck and screamed and pleaded, but it was no use – Lammy was dragged into the truck, and they drove off.    We were absolutely  inconsolable as we went back to the Noltes’.  We couldn’t go back to our own home because of all the broken glass and furniture, so we just had to wait it out.  I was desperate for my mother to arrive and it was a very long day for us;  the conversation was strained because we didn’t know whose side our nice neighbours were on, or whether they dared even say they were on our side – and perhaps they didn’t know themselves.

Four hours later, the same truck pulled up in front of our house and our Lammy was paraded out and back into the stable …

VL:  What?!

RB:  Yes.  And I spent most of the rest of that day lying in the sweet-smelling straw, with him, waiting for my mother to come home.  It was much later that we found out WHY they brought him back.  Apparently, we were crying so loudly that the wife of someone high up in the Nazi party heard us, found out what had happened, felt sorry for us  and told her husband that if the lamb wasn’t returned to us, there’d be hell to pay.

VL:  So back he came?  How extraordinary.  You really wouldn’t have put any money on that happening, would you?

RB:  No.  None at all …

VL: So, eventually, your Mother arrived home?

RB:  Yes, at the appointed time.  She came home with somebody who had met her off the train – and I had never seen my Mother the way she was when she got back – nor did I ever witness anything like it again.  She was an absolute powerhouse – determined, controlled, unemotional – ready to tackle anything and everything.  She was NOT going to take it lying down and she just  inspired total confidence.  The very next morning, she sprung into action …

Continued tomorrow …