48 Hours of Kristallnacht
By Mitchell G. Bard
The Lyons Press
256 pages; $19.95
One of the most important life cycle events for a young Jewish boy and his family is the celebration of his bar mitzvah. Ordinarily the bar mitzvah is one of the happiest days of a boy's life, but for these Jews it was a nightmare they will never forget.
Sigi Hart was preparing for his bar mitzvah in Berlin. On November 9, he headed for school and saw smoke and fires. "They started to break the windows of the Jewish stores, they took out the merchandise. They brought big, big picket signs, 'Don't buy from the Jews.' They started burning the synagogues... Everyone was invited to temple and we didn't know what to do."
The person who took care of the synagogue had a little house in the back that was not destroyed in the fire. The week after Kristallnacht he offered to let the Harts use it for the bar mitzvah. "We came Saturday morning to this place. We had about three or four people standing outside watching if they saw any police or SS or Nazis coming [so] we could escape from the backyard. In one corner were the burned Torah scrolls, they were lying on the floor covered [Hart breaks down as he recalls the scene]. I said my bracha [prayer]. I did what I had to do for my bar mitzvah. This was supposed to be my happiest day. The rabbi was standing there crying. He told me when he made a bracha, 'Remember, never forget.' This was my bar mitzvah, 1938. We went home and my parents decided this is not a life to continue."
Ernest Marx never had a chance to celebrate his bar mitzvah in his home town of Speyer. "My bar mitzvah was supposed to be on November 19th, 1938. I was in Dachau. I never heard the name Kristallnacht until I came to this country. To us it was the 9th of November. It was still one of the worst nights of my life. I saw the flames of our synagogue, which I'll never forget. It was only a few blocks from us." Marx said he "experienced fear of living" as he watched people break into the store of the kosher butcher and ransack stores. "I saw the flames, I heard the sirens. I saw the firemen going by, but they didn't put out the fire. They were protecting the other houses of the Christians..."
Marx fondly recalled that his parents had hung up a new bicycle in the window. "It was amazing a kid of 13 would get a bicycle for his bar mitzvah. It was a shiny bicycle. Nobody ever got a bicycle for his bar mitzvah, a used one maybe, but this was like getting a Cadillac.
"That night two men from the Gestapo came and arrested my father. I think he knew them, being in a small town. He asked them, 'Why am I being arrested?' They said, 'None of your damn business. Pack a suitcase for an overnight stay.' My mother was hysterical. He was told to take one of his two sons and he picked me. To this day I don't know why my father took me. I have come to the conclusion either he loved me more than my brother or he wanted my brother to stay with my mother as a protector. We were taken to the police headquarters down the street. Sixty to eighty Jewish people were assembled. We were shoved into a bus. They gave us something to eat, I think a sort of a sandwich. My father was orthodox and wouldn't eat it because it wasn't kosher. He told me to eat it. I think it was just a slice of bread with butter or something. We rode all night in the bus and came to the most feared camp in Germany at that time - Dachau.
"There was an expression, if you're not nice, you go to Dachau. If you had an argument with a Nazi, you were taken to Dachau. Everybody knew that. What do I know? I was 13. I was a dumb kid who loved to play soccer. I didn't think it was going to be the end of the world. When I came back from Dachau, the bike was gone. That was when I got mad at the Germans. They stole my bike."
Frederick Firnbacher lived in Straubing. He was only eight and remembers that November 9 started as a normal day. Then the world turned upside down. "They went to our synagogue and ransacked it, but couldn't burn it because it was in a residential neighborhood. Then they went around to the different houses where Jews lived and tried to break in. Our house had a very strong door and they weren't able to break in. Some of the neighbors stuck their heads out and told them to be quiet and to leave and finally they left.
"In the morning, the German police came to the house with an arrest warrant for my father and took him off to the local jail where he stayed for a couple of days. While he was there, he met all the other Jewish males and a couple of days later he was sent to Dachau. Meanwhile, at the synagogue (which was built in 1907), they had taken fire axes and torn up the synagogue and desecrated the Torahs and the prayer books, and the ark was a shambles. The Germans came back later and collected the different things and took them to police headquarters."
One of the items the Germans took was a Torah that belonged to Firnbacher's family. "My great-grandfather had moved to the United States, struck gold and returned to Germany a wealthy man. He hired a sofer [a scribe] to move into his house and write the weekly portion each week. It took an entire year and [the Torah] was ready in time for my grandfather's bar mitzvah in 1872. It was also used for my father's bar mitzvah. My dad later on went to the Gestapo because he had permission to take the Torah out of Germany to the United States. And luckily they gave it to him and said, 'Here, take it.' So they gave him some sort of permission. He carried the Torah through the snow. Just imagine a Jew in 1938 carrying a Torah through the streets of Germany. He brought it to the U.S. and I was bar mitzvahed out of it, and my son Michael was bar mitzvahed on the 100th anniversary of when it was written." The Firnbacher scroll is now in Ohr Kodesh synagogue in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Arnold Fleischmann lived in Bayreuth, but was staying with a family named Bloom in Nuremberg while he studied for his bar mitzvah. He recalled feeling confident in public places. "I wasn't afraid to get on a street car or going to school or walking the streets, even though we sometimes got into fights on the way to school. We kept our tennis shoes in our gym bags and would use our shoes to beat them back." Everything changed on Kristallnacht.
