Four Perfect Pebbles

by Lila Perl

  Why, the Blumenthals debated around their family dinner table, had this frightening development taken place? One didn’t have to look far for the answer. Economic conditions in Germany had been very bad ever since the defeat of the fatherland in the Great War of 1914–1918. And the worldwide depression that hit in 1929 had only made things worse.

  Hitler insisted that he had the remedy for all of Germany’s woes. Through his frequent public speeches at massive Nazi-sponsored rallies, he made his message clear. He would restore Germany’s honor, increase its territory, and bring back its lost prosperity. His attacks on its “enemies within,” especially the Jews, grew more and more frenzied. Once again the long-smoldering hatred of the Jews, known as anti-Semitism—one of the oldest prejudices in the world—was fanned into flames.

  In one way it seemed strange that Hitler should pick on Germany’s Jews, because there were so few of them. They numbered only about 500,000 in a population of 67 million, less than 1 percent of the German citizenry. But in spite of being a minority, they were remarkably visible on the German scene.

  True, Jews didn’t run the giant industries of Germany, such as Krupp, Farben, or Siemens. Nor did many Jews hold high political offices. But they were involved in businesses and professions, such as banking, merchandising, publishing, medicine, science, and the arts. In the capital city of Berlin, where about one-third of Germany’s Jews lived, the major department stores were Jewish-owned: Wertheim, Hermann Teitz, N. Israel, and the famed KaDeWe, or Kaufhaus des Westens. Whatever abilities, talents, influence, or wealth the Jews of Germany possessed were seen as a threat by the Nazis.

  Today the year that is remembered as the beginning of official racist activity in Germany is 1933. On January 30 Adolf Hitler, as the leader of the majority party, was appointed chancellor, or prime minister, by Germany’s president, the aged Paul von Hindenburg. The chancellor lost no time in putting his new powers to work. On April 1 he ordered a nationwide boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses. Signs reading DON’T BUY FROM JEWS were posted on shopwindows in major cities and in towns large and small. Hitler’s order was enforced by the presence of brown-uniformed Nazi storm troopers who blocked the entrances to Jewish-owned stores, medical offices, and law firms.

  “Did we find this surprising?” Mama remarked as she recalled the 1933 boycott. “Yes, in a way. How could it be that people in that small town of Hoya would turn away from us so quickly? Walter’s parents had been in business there since 1894. They always gave good service and value and were highly respected by their customers from both the town and the surrounding countryside.

  “Walter grew up in that town. In 1914, at the age of seventeen, he volunteered for the German Army. He served his country in the Great War for four years and was awarded the medal of honor known as the Iron Cross. But all this was immediately forgotten when Hitler took power. As early as April 1933, a few days after the Jewish boycott began, children ran through the street throwing stones at Albert’s baby carriage.”

  As the boycott continued, business dropped off at the store. So Walter bought a small car and began to make deliveries to people in the town and on the farms. “Our old customers still wanted the merchandise we sold,” Mama explained, “but they were afraid to be seen entering the store.”

  The discussions around the Blumenthals’ dinner table grew more intense. Walter thought that the family should make plans to leave Germany at once. But Oma and Opa, already elderly, could not imagine leaving the business and moving away. “You will see,” the older Blumenthals counseled. “This Hitler won’t last. Before long things will come back to normal.”

  “Back to normal,” Mama repeated bitterly. “How could that happen? The very next year, in 1934, the elderly President von Hindenburg died and Hitler became both chancellor and president of Germany, its supreme leader, der Führer.”

  Ruth Blumenthal had been right. The future held no real hope for improvement. Already, children, like those who had stoned Albert’s baby carriage, were being groomed for the Hitler Youth. Even three-year-olds were given Nazi banners to wave. The flag featured a bold black swastika inside a white circle, surrounded by a bright red field. The Nazi swastika, based on a symbol used by many different ancient peoples, was a cross with its arms extended at right angles in a clockwise direction.

  German schoolchildren wearing uniforms with swastika armbands were soon organized into formal groups and trained in the Nazi creed. A favorite marching song of the Hitler Youth of 1934 contained the words:

  Und wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt,

  Dann geht’s nochmal so gut!

  [And when Jewish blood spurts from the knife,

  Then things will go well again!]

  The following year Hitler made anti-Semitism part of German law. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, were passed by the Reichstag at its meeting in the southern German city of Nuremberg. These rulings stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jewish or other “pure” Germans, known as Aryans. Germany’s Jews were now completely cut off from any hope of receiving just treatment under the law.

  The boycott, which aimed at destroying all Jewish businesses in Germany, had, of course, continued. At the same time non-Jewish firms were pressured to dismiss their Jewish employees. Signs in shopwindows, advertising for help, clearly read JEWS NOT WANTED.

  With the takeover of Jewish businesses and jobs, properties and bank accounts, Germany’s economy was already beginning to improve. But Hitler planned to go much further. Germany, he declared, was to become Judenrein, or totally free of Jews. Meantime, disobedience or even the suspicion that a Jew was not complying with the laws could lead to beatings, arrests, imprisonment, and even death. Not all Germans agreed with the racial policies of the Nazis. But few had the courage to defy the iron rule of Hitler.

  In 1933 Germany’s first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened near Munich. It was run by Hitler’s Schutzstaffeln, an elite protection and security service, known as the SS. Once confined behind the camp’s barbed wire, “critics” of the regime—both Jewish and non-Jewish—received brutal and savage treatment. At Dachau the pattern was set for the operation of the dozens of concentration and extermination camps to which prisoners from all over Europe were to be sent in the near future.

  “Even though we could see what was coming,” Mama recalled sadly, “we hung on for the sake of our elderly parents. But many Jews were already leaving Germany.”

  Indeed, by the end of 1937 about 130,000, a quarter of Germany’s Jews, had emigrated. Many made their way to Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, England, or the Americas. Some managed to enter Palestine, while others even relocated in the distant city of Shanghai in China. The United States was the most favored destination. But documents for that country were the most difficult to obtain because its immigration quota was very limited.

  Leaving Germany was both painful and costly. Family and friends remained behind. Jewish properties and businesses had to be sold to Germans for far less than their true market values. And the German government demanded compensation for the privilege of emigration.

  “But all this,” Mama said, “we would have done. Except that now Oma, in her seventies, was ill with cancer.”

  Then, early in 1938, the picture changed drastically for the younger Blumenthals. Oma, Marion’s grandmother, aged seventy-two, died. And within weeks her death was followed by that of Opa, aged eighty-three, who suffered a heart attack. Although deeply saddened, the family agreed that the deaths of Oma and Opa had spared them the difficulty of being forcibly removed from their lifelong home.

  Now there was no more time to be lost. Four months after Opa’s death the store and its contents, the building, and most of the Blumenthals’ household goods were sold, for a fraction of their worth. In the spring of 1938 Ruth and Walter, five-year-old Albert, and three-year-old Marion left the small town of Hoya and moved into an apartment in the city of Hanover.

 
“Why did we go to Hanover? For one purpose,” Mama explained. “To work on getting papers for the United States and to leave for there as soon as possible.”

  “Soon,” however, did not mean within a couple of months. Ruth and Walter knew all too well that the process could be painfully slow, taking as long as two years.

  The United States, once a haven for immigrants, had tightened its admissions policy during the 1920s and had kept its doors virtually shut through the depression of the 1930s. In 1938 it planned to admit only about 27,000 immigrants from Germany and Austria.

  On March 12, 1938, Hitler had annexed Austria, Germany’s neighbor and the country of his birth. Pro-Nazi sentiments ran high in Austria, and Austrian Jews immediately began to look for a means of escape, increasing the demand for places on the U.S. quota list. Yet, on the basis of recent practice, it seemed all too likely that the U.S. immigration authorities would issue even fewer quota numbers than the 27,000 that had been allotted for the year.

  In addition to getting on the quota list, a foreigner needed an affidavit—a written guarantee from a relative, a friend, or some other acceptable sponsor already living in the United States—that the newcomer would be cared for financially and would not become a public charge.

  Lastly, the would-be immigrant had to obtain a visa. This all-important document was the actual permission to enter the United States. Often the visa was stamped directly into the person’s passport, another document that had to be in perfect order.

  “We already had the affidavit,” Mama said. “It was from Tante [Aunt] Clara, a sister of Walter’s who lived in New York City. So you can imagine our joy when we were notified in Hanover that on September thirteenth, 1938, we had been placed on the quota list for the United States!”

  There, indeed, was the official notice, with the four quota numbers running in sequence from 7375 to 7378, one for each member of the Blumenthal family. Now all that was lacking was the visa.

  How soon would it come through? With luck it might be issued within a year. But it would be a dangerous year. For Hitler not only was closing in steadily on the Jews but also appeared to be pushing Germany toward a massive takeover of Europe. Was there enough time left in which to escape Hitler’s grasp and move on to a new life in America?

  CHAPTER 3

  “Get Dressed and Come with Us”

  In the Blumenthal apartment in Hanover the children lay ill with whooping cough. Although the most serious stage of the disease had passed, Marion and Albert still coughed and made frightening gagging sounds in the night. Ruth and Walter rose frequently to comfort them.

  It was now November 1938, and the bleak German autumn had begun. It was much too soon to expect news of the visa that would take the family to America. “Patience . . . we must have patience,” the worried parents told themselves.

  But the autumn of 1938 was a frightening time to be waiting for a way out of Germany. During the summer organized gangs of Nazis had set fire to and destroyed the main synagogues of Nuremberg and Munich, another important city of southern Germany.

  The government claimed that such acts were merely “random” violence against Jews. But at the same time Hitler was introducing new measures to identify Germany’s Jews and to isolate them from the rest of society. On August 17 a law was passed that forced all Jewish females to take the middle name Sarah. All males were to be given the name Israel, and these names were to be added to existing legal documents, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports. Not long afterward, on October 5, it was decreed that all passports and other documents held by Germany’s Jews must also be marked with a large letter J.

  During the six months the Blumenthals lived in Hanover, they made few friends. “We hoped, of course,” Mama said, “that we would be there only a short time. But we were lucky in our good Jewish neighbors, the Dannenbergs, who also turned out to be our very good friends.”

  The Dannenberg family—Bertha, Walter, and their son, Gerd, or Gary, who was two years older than Albert—lived on the floor above the Blumenthals in the small Hanover apartment building.

  “On the eighth of November,” Mama recalled, “Mr. Dannenberg visited us with a warning. There was going to be ‘some trouble.’ It had to do with the Polish Jews who were being deported from Germany.”

  The expulsion of thousands of Jews who had been in Polish territory but had lived in Germany since 1918 was another of Hitler’s measures to make Germany racially pure. The roundup of this group had begun on October 28. Swiftly and brutally some 18,000 Polish-born Jews were torn from their homes and businesses, packed into trains, and dumped just short of the Polish border. There they were stripped of all their belongings except ten marks and forced to walk the rest of the way into Poland.

  Many lived in the stables and pigsties of farms on the Polish frontier until they could find relatives or friends to take them in. One deportee, Zindel Grynszpan, managed to send a postcard to his son, seventeen-year-old Herschel, who had earlier fled to Paris. Infuriated, the young man bought a pistol, entered the German Embassy in Paris, and shot the first official he met, Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary to the ambassador. The date was November 7, 1938.

  As vom Rath lay seriously wounded, a growing fear gripped the Jewish people of Germany. Suppose vom Rath died, the victim of a Jewish assassin. Hitler would surely exact a violent revenge, especially at a time so close to the notorious Nazi memorial date of November 9.

  It was on November 9, 1923, that Hitler had been arrested in Munich for his unsuccessful attempt—known as the Beer Hall Putsch—to overthrow the German government. Ever since the Nazis had come to power in 1933, November 9 was the day on which the party celebrated its triumph. Hitler went back to Munich to meet with his old guard, massive rallies were held, and promotions were made within the party ranks.

  “Guns,” Mr. Dannenberg warned the Blumenthals when he visited them on the evening of November 8. “If you have a gun in the house, get rid of it. If they make a search and they find it, you will be finished.”

  It had been illegal for some time for a Jew to own a firearm of any sort. But Walter was still in possession of his service revolver. He was proud of his record during the war of 1914–1918 and thought of himself as a loyal member of the German Army. Even though the Nazis had taken over in Germany, it seemed impossible that he could be arrested, even sentenced to death, for having kept the revolver he’d owned while defending the country.

  Yet both he and Ruth knew that this was true. “So, on that very evening,” Mama said, “we took the revolver and wrapped it in many layers of paper. Then, very late, we went out and walked to a nearby park where there was an artificial lake. We were very careful that nobody saw us. Then we silently dropped Walter’s service revolver into the lake and came home.”

  The next day, November 9, vom Rath died in Paris. All that day things were strangely quiet in Germany. Hitler was in Munich for his political victory celebration. Many people expected he would make a frenzied speech on the radio, calling for severe new anti-Jewish measures. But evening came, it grew late, and people began to prepare for bed. In the Blumenthal apartment all was still except for the spasms of coughing from the sick children.

  Then, an hour or so after midnight, Nazi marching songs and the sharp rhythm of hobnailed boots began to be heard in the streets of Hanover. These were followed by sounds of shouting, the crack of pistol shots, and what seemed to be the crashing of broken glass. Occasionally, too, the sky flickered with tongues of orange light from distant fires.

  The sounds of terror rose and fell, well into the small hours of the morning of November 10, as the rampaging storm troops drew closer to the Blumenthal building, only to retreat in some other direction. Then, sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 A.M., there was an explosion that rocked the entire city. Nazi demolition teams had blown up the Central Synagogue, a thick-walled building that was one of the largest religious structures in Hanover.

  In the Blumenthal apartment, and even at a m
uch greater distance from the synagogue, the windows rattled violently. “It was soon afterward, sometime around five A.M.,” Mama related, “that we heard the thud of rifle butts at the downstairs entrance to the building.” A few moments later the bell rang and there was a sharp rapping at the door of the Blumenthals’ second-floor apartment.

  “It was the Gestapo, the secret state police,” Mama said. “They asked for Papa by name. ‘Get dressed,’ they said, ‘and come with us.’ Just like that. ‘Get dressed and come with us.’

  “While Walter was hastily putting on his clothes, they searched the apartment. At that time the Nazis were taking away only men, not women or children. How fortunate, though, that we had gotten rid of the gun.

  “When Walter was fully dressed and ready to go, he asked the officers, ‘May I go to the synagogue first to say my morning prayers?’ ‘No!’ they replied angrily. They had searched the apartment but had found nothing of value. ‘That car out front,’ one of them asked. ‘Is it yours?’ ‘Yes,’ Walter answered. ‘Give us the keys,’ the officer demanded. Walter handed them over, and of course, we never saw the car again. But that was the least of it. The question was, Where were they taking Papa? Would we ever see him again?”

  All over Germany and Austria the outburst of violence against the Jews continued throughout November 10. In Hanover, which had been Herschel Grynszpan’s hometown, scattered acts of vengeance continued even longer. Gradually the extent of the damage was learned.

  In Germany alone, some eight thousand Jewish-owned shops had had their windows smashed and their contents looted. Two hundred synagogues had been destroyed, their Torah scrolls and holy books burned. Unoccupied Jewish houses and apartments had been entered by force. Furniture and even pianos were heaved from balconies into the streets below. Possessions of every sort crackled in the bonfires that leaped up on numerous street corners. But it was the vast amount of shattered glass that gave the infamous night of November 9–10 the name of Kristallnacht, Night of Broken Glass.