On Shabbat, November 4, the residents of Bayit Balev, a retirement home in Jerusalem where I live, waited anxiously for a talk by Miriam Litke. It was the week of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, which took place across Germany and Austria on November 9 and 10, 1938.
A survivor of that terrible event, Litke has become a noted authority on the period.
Born in Berlin in 1927, Litke was saved by joining the Kindertransport to England. That afternoon at Bayit Balev, she brought to life that very terrible period in German-Jewish history and helped us understand how she survived.
An authoritative, eyewitness account: Kristallnacht and the Holocaust
“1933. Hitler came to power,” she started dramatically. “I began school that year at the Jewish school for girls. In 1922, my father had left Lodz, Poland, and moved to Berlin, where he had a store for woolen goods. In 1933, he had to close his business. My father began to travel with his wares; he was gone during the week and returned home for Shabbat.”
She saw Hitler Youth standing around some of the Jewish stores that were still open.“Why were they targeting the stores of Jews?” she had asked herself.
She told us, “For many German Jews, this potent sign of what was to come still was not powerful enough to make them leave.”
I was captivated by her description of the events of 1938. In October of 1938, the Nazis decided to rid themselves of all their Polish-born citizens. Litke’s description of how her father was taken away by the Nazis provided us, through her eyes, a sense of the fear generated.
“It was in the middle of the night,” she said, recalling what occurred on October 28, 1938. “There was a loud knock on the door.” She jumped out of bed thinking, “Oh, my mother forgot to leave the latch open so that my father could open the door.”
She opened the door, expecting her father – but there they stood: “Nazis in uniform” wearing their black shirts. She knew that they were coming for her father. She told them that he was not home, but she saw his hat on the shelf. She knew that she had told a lie. “I am going to be in big trouble,” she thought to herself.
She is and was very moral, even in the face of those Nazis.
Her father and mother woke up; they came out of their room. “My father was ordered to leave. He took his tallit and tefillin,” she recalled, “feeling he would be back soon.” That was not the case. Polish born, he was immediately shipped to the border of Poland, where he remained in special housing at Zbonsyn.
Miriam’s first-hand description of Kristallnacht was stark and significant. “We received mail from my father, emphasizing he would return soon.” However, on the 9th of November, Kristallnacht erupted.
“We were in our apartment. We lived in an apartment complex which was U-shaped. In the courtyard was our shul, Beth Zion. On Kristallnacht, the destroyers arrived. Even though it was night, as well as a blackout, through our window we saw everything. How ironic – the Nazi attackers were ordered not to set fire to our shul because there was a chemical factory nearby. However, they destroyed whatever they could.”
Now the shul building was emptied. “They threw out the Sifrei Torah; all the sforim – books; all the siddurim – the prayer books. Then came the next destructive act. They uprooted the benches from the floor; then heave-ho, they threw them out of the synagogue. We watched in horror, but then we heard them say,‘I think up there, some more Jews.’ We shuddered waiting, but they didn’t come up to get us, so we were all right.”
One of her uncles had a large furniture store on a main street in Berlin. The next day, she was asked to go and see what had happened, “to make sure that the people who worked for them didn’t steal something. It was not called Kristallnacht for nothing.
“I was 11. I went there as I was asked to do. I stood around, and I saw that the display plate glass windows were shattered. As I was standing there taking in the destruction, a woman said ‘Das is a Juedishe maidele’ – this is a Jewish girl. I turned and ran home, realizing what the mobs could do to me. It was overwhelming.”
A central role in the attacks on the Jews themselves and the Jewish stores was played by the Hitler Youth.
“As I was going to school, I would try to hide in the doorways,” she said. “Then when the Hitler Youth threw stones at the Jewish students, they would miss us.”
Her brother, who was 15 years old, the age to be taken away, thankfully missed being picked up by the Nazis the first time. A few days later, he survived a second Nazi roundup because he wasn’t at home.
“At that point, we knew we had to get out,” she said. “We knew we had to leave.”
Sadly, we heard about what German Jews would do to try to survive. Litke described what her mother did in an effort to save her family.
“My mother made rounds of the various consulates: South American consulates, the Uruguayan, the Paraguayan, the Peruvian. They sold visas, which my mother was given, but they were worthless.”
With her wry sense of humor, she quipped: “The only benefit that came out of that was that I learned geography.”
When her father finally returned to Berlin, her parents registered her brother with Youth Aliyah, which trained its participants for aliyah. Litke was registered with the Kindertransport. At the end of May 1939, her brother was the first to leave for England, then on to Scotland.
“My mother prepared a dowry for me, nedunia, because she didn’t know what was going to happen. I was registered to go to England, but she couldn’t give me any items to carry because we were not allowed to take anything with us. Thus the dowry and everything else I owned were to be sent by a shipper to England,” she recounted.
The end of June 1939, she and her parents traveled to Lodz. There, she would wait until she was notified that her turn had come to join the Kindertransport. Because she had not seen her father’s and mother’s large family for over a year, it was a very exciting time for her. On her father’s 40th birthday, July 30, 1939, she received notice to return to Berlin and prepare to board the Kindertransport.
We can only imagine how her mother and father felt. “My parents took me to the train station in Lodz for my trip to Berlin. My father took me to my compartment, asked a man sitting there to look after me,” she said. “My mother stayed behind a little bit, she didn’t come all the way to the compartment. When I look back and think that she had already sent off a son and now me, truly I understand that she really could not do it all the way; she just couldn’t.”
When Litke arrived in Berlin, she discovered that the Kindertransport she was to take had left. She would have to wait 10 days for the next one. “I was in Berlin, where I had grown up. I knew where to go,” she said. “Since I needed a place to stay, I went to a children’s and women’s hostel, which I was familiar with and which was frum.”
What else could she do? Her father had asked her to check with the shipper why the family’s shipment had not arrived. He assured her it had been sent, but it never came. There she was, 12 years old and alone. The Nazis, Stormtroopers, and Hitler Youth were all around. Berlin was a city gone mad. Hitler had promised his citizens great victories, with various European countries under their wing. As I spoke to Litke, I realized that nothing could deter her – even at that age.
“I had no choice,” she remarked.
The officials determined to send her to England. She and her brother believed that they would see their parents in a few months.
“My Kindertransport left 10 days later. I went to the station and found the right group. I guess somebody must have helped me. We traveled on the train and reached Holland, which was already wonderful once you get past the German border. Dutch people welcome you with cocoa and goodies. On to England from one of the ports in Holland, sailing across a choppy English Channel.”
When she arrived in London, she was met by an official of the Kindertransport and was taken to the town of Hemel Hempstead. There, she lived for five years with a Christian family who were not religious but respected her Judaism. Another girl, who had arrived in England on the same ship, was also assigned to that home. In public and in school, they were not permitted to speak German.
“We learned English very quickly, but at night we had a good time speaking German to each other,” she said
Since I have a great interest in archival preservation, I want to alert researchers that Lipke’s letters to her brother between 1939 and 1944 were saved by her brother and can be read at Yad Vashem. ■