The Holocaust (10 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
While being marched up the steps to the synagogue, several Jews fell, only to be beaten until they could pick themselves up. Once inside the synagogue, the Jews were confronted by exuberant Nazi officers and SS men. Dr Flehinger himself was ordered to read out passages from
Mein Kampf
to his fellow Jews. ‘I read the passage
quietly, indeed so quietly that the SS man posted behind me repeatedly hit me in the neck,’ Dr Flehinger later recalled. ‘Those who had to read other passages after me were treated in the same manner. After these “readings” there was a pause. Those Jews who wanted to relieve themselves were forced to do so against the synagogue walls, not in the toilets, and they were physically abused while doing so.’
The Jews were led away. Within an hour, the synagogue was in flames. ‘If it had been my decision,’ one of the SS men remarked, ‘you would have perished in that fire.’
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No village in which Jews still lived was immune from the destruction. In Hoengen, a small village near Aachen, the tiny Jewish community had built its synagogue in 1926: now, twelve years later, Michael Lucas, a butcher by trade, whose house was opposite the meadow, watched from his window as Stormtroops stood on guard. His nephew Eric later recalled:
After a while, the Stormtroops were joined by people who were not in uniform; and suddenly, with one loud cry of, ‘Down with the Jews’, the gathering outside produced axes and heavy sledgehammers. They advanced towards the little synagogue which stood in Michael’s own meadow, opposite his house. They burst the door open, and the whole crowd, by now shouting and laughing, stormed into the little House of God.
Michael, standing behind the tightly drawn curtains, saw how the crowd tore the Holy Ark wide open; and three men who had smashed the ark, threw the Scrolls of the Law of Moses out. He threw them—these Scrolls, which had stood in their quiet dignity, draped in blue or wine-red velvet, with their little crowns of silver covering the tops of the shafts by which the Scroll was held during the service—to the screaming and shouting mass of people which had filled the little synagogue.
The people caught the Scrolls as if they were amusing themselves with a ball-game—tossing them up into the air again, while other people flung them further back until they reached the street outside. Women tore away the red and blue velvet and everybody tried to snatch some of the silver adorning the Scrolls.
Naked and open, the Scrolls lay in the muddy autumn lane; children stepped on them and others tore pieces from the fine
parchment on which the Law was written—the same Law which the people who tore it apart had, in vain, tried to absorb for over a thousand years.
When the first Scroll was thrown out of the synagogue, Michael made a dash for the door. His heart beat violently and his senses became blurred and hazy. Unknown fury built up within him, and his clenched fists pressed against his temples. Michael forgot that to take one step outside the house amongst the crowds would mean his death.
The Stormtroopers, who still stood outside the house watching with stern faces over the tumultuous crowd which obeyed their commands without really knowing it, would have shot the man, quietly, in an almost matter of fact way. Michael’s wife, sensing the deadly danger, ran after her husband, and clung to him, imploring him and begging him not to go outside. Michael tried to fling her aside, but only her tenacious resistance brought him back to his senses.
He stood there, in the small hall behind the front door, looking around him for a second, as if he did not know where he was. Suddenly he leaned against the wall, tears streaming from his eyes, like those of a little child.
After a while, he heard the sound of many heavy hammers outside. With trembling legs he got up from his chair and looked outside once more. Men had climbed on to the roof of the synagogue, and were hurling the tiles down, others were cutting the cross beams as soon as they were bare of cover. It did not take long before the first heavy grey stones came tumbling down, and the children of the village amused themselves as they flung stones into the many-coloured windows.
When the first rays of a cold and pale November sun penetrated the heavy dark clouds, the little synagogue was but a heap of stone, broken glass and smashed-up woodwork.
Where the two well cared for flowerbeds had flanked both sides of the gravel path leading to the door of the synagogue, the children had lit a bonfire and the parchment of the Scrolls gave enough food for the flames to eat up the smashed-up benches and doors, and the wood, which only the day before had been the Holy Ark for the Scrolls of the Law of Moses.
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Similar scenes were repeated throughout the Reich. In Worms, Herta Mansbacher, the assistant principal of the Jewish school, was
among those who managed to put out the fire in the synagogue, but a gang of louts soon arrived to light it again. In a gesture of defiance, Herta Mansbacher barred the entrance. ‘As much as they sought to put a Jewish house of worship to the torch,’ the historian of Worms Jewry has written, ‘she was equally willing to stop them, even at the risk of her life.’
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Herta Mansbacher was eventually pushed aside, and the synagogue burned to the ground. She survived, until the deportation from Worms of 20 March 1942.
In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, German Jewry was ‘fined’ for the damage done. The fine, a thousand million marks, was levied by the compulsory confiscation of twenty per cent of the property of every German Jew.
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This confiscation was promulgated by government decree on 12 November 1938. Three days later, following more than five years of being pilloried and discriminated against in the classroom, German Jewish children were finally barred from German schools.
Not every German watched these events unmoved, or unprepared to challenge them. On 16 November 1938, a week after the Kristallnacht, Pastor J. von Jan preached to his congregation in Swabia: ‘Houses of worship, sacred to others, have been burned down with impunity—men who have locally served our nation and conscientiously done their duty, have been thrown into concentration camps simply because they belong to a different race. Our nation’s infamy is bound to bring about Divine punishment.’
Dragged out of his Bible class by a Nazi mob, Pastor Jan was brutally beaten, then thrown on to the roof of a shed. The mob then smashed his vicarage, just as, a week earlier, so many Jewish houses had been smashed. Pastor Jan was imprisoned.
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The ‘opportunity offered by Grynszpan’s criminal act’, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes wrote to London from Berlin on that same day, November 16, ‘has let loose forces of medieval barbarism’. The position of the German Jews was, he commented, ‘indeed tragic’, and he added: ‘They dwell in the grip and at the mercy of a brutal oligarchy, which fiercely resents all humanitarian foreign intervention. Misery and despair are already there and when their resources are either denied to them or exhausted, their end will be starvation.’ The Jews of Germany, he feared, were ‘not a national but a world
problem which if neglected contains the seeds of a terrible vengeance’.
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On November 19 the burning spread to the Free City of Memel, many of whose Jews fled eastward into Lithuania.
The Jews who had been seized during the Kristallnacht, and sent to concentration camps, experienced a foretaste of what that vengeance might be. On November 23 the
News Chronicle
, a London newspaper, reported the arrival of sixty-two Jews, including two rabbis, at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin. The arrested men had reached the camp gates under police escort from Berlin. At the gates, the police were made to hand them over to an SS unit. The sixty-two Jews were then forced to run a gauntlet of spades, clubs and whips. According to an eye-witness, the police, ‘unable to bear their cries, turned their backs’. As the Jews were beaten, they fell. As they fell they were beaten further. This ‘orgy’ of beating lasted half an hour. When it was over, ‘twelve of the sixty-two were dead, their skulls smashed. The others were all unconscious. The eyes of some had been knocked out, their faces flattened and shapeless.’
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In New York, on November 23, a mass demonstration organized by the Joint Boycott Council protested against the renewed violence. Two days later, in Chicago, protesters burned swastika flags.
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Elsewhere, however, the Nazi excesses only fanned the flames of hatred. In the Slovak province of the now truncated Czechoslovakia, the anti-Jewish party having gained the ascendancy, attacks on Jews not only increased, but went unchallenged by the police. The writer Dr Geza Fischer was attacked in the street. ‘He was an inoffensive man’, one of Fischer’s colleagues later recalled, ‘of definite Jewish appearance. He was brought into a doorway and his head was knocked against the wall. He was brought to the hospital half dead, and he died within a few hours. His wife committed suicide.’
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The search for refuge had become desperate. From Berlin, Captain Foley sent a strongly worded telegram to Jerusalem, asking for extra Palestine certificates, including one thousand for young Jews who might thereby be allowed in without their parents. As Benno Cohn recalled, Foley ‘did everything in his power to enable us to bring over as many Jews as possible. He helped all the categories, and one can say that he rescued thousands of Jews from the jaws of death.’
20
Among those who saw Captain Foley at work in the British Passport Control Office in Berlin was the young Dutchman, Wim van Leer. Forty-six years later he recalled Foley’s ‘genuine compassion for the throngs that day in, day out besieged his office with their applications, requests and enquiries as to the progress of their case’. Van Leer added: ‘The winter of 1938 was a harsh one, and elderly men and women waited from six in the morning, queuing up in the snow and biting wind. Captain Foley saw to it that a uniformed commissionaire trundled a tea-urn on a trolley along the line of frozen misery, and all this despite the clientele, neurotic with frustration and cold, doing little to lighten his task.’
21
On December 2 the first train bound for Harwich with German Jewish children on board arrived from the Hook of Holland: two hundred children, all of them orphans, who had left Germany at twenty-four hours’ notice, each with two bags of clothing.
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In Britain they found sanctuary, as had more than fifty thousand German and Austrian refugees. But while tens of thousands found sanctuary, there were neither permits nor funds for the hundreds of thousands. ‘The first effort’, noted the provincial Council for German Jewry in Hull, ‘will be to save the children.’
23
The persecutions in Germany continued. The only possibility of bringing pressure to bear on the German Government, wrote one British official, Roger Makins, ‘is by retaliation, expulsion of German citizens, and by a clear indication that until persecution or spoliation of Jews ceases, the policy of appeasement is at an end’.
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But the policy of appeasement was not at an end. Nor were the gates of immigration to be opened by any country to the extent required. On December 14, the British Cabinet, headed by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, decided to allow ten thousand German Jewish children to enter Britain, provided the refugee organizations would guarantee to maintain them; but it rejected an appeal from the Jewish Agency for Palestine for an additional twenty-one thousand Palestine certificates.
25
Several thousand Jews, travelling by boat from German ports to Shanghai, were able to enter Shanghai without visas. Despite Foreign Office hesitation in London, Captain Foley supported this method of emigration: ‘It might be considered humane on our part not to interfere officially to prevent the Jews from choosing their own graveyards. They would rather die as free men in Shanghai
than as slaves in Dachau.’ Speaking in Berlin on 30 January 1939, Hitler declared that in the event of war: ‘The result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’
26
Six days before Hitler’s speech, Field Marshal Goering had instructed General Heydrich to ‘solve’ the so-called Jewish problem ‘by emigration and evacuation’.
27
In England, a disused army camp at Richborough in Kent was opened in February for future arrivals; it could hold three thousand people at a time. Individual visas were not required by those who arrived: only a block permit. Within twelve months, eight thousand Jews had passed through this camp to homes in Britain, most of them young men who had been sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps after the Kristallnacht, and had later been released.
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Among those German Jews who now found haven in Britain was Eric Lucas, whose Uncle Michael had watched the destruction of the small Hoengen synagogue on 9 November 1938. ‘It was a cold, dark February morning,’ Lucas later recalled. ‘The train which was to carry me to safety waited on the platform. I had hoped that in a few days, that train would carry my sister, and perhaps in a few months, my parents, to safety.’ His account continued:
The town where we lived was the border-control point, as beyond it stretched the still free towns of Belgium and Holland. In just over an hour the train would speed through the fertile lowlands of Belgium, and would take me right to the Channel Port of Ostend.
I was the only passenger who boarded the train at that station. To travel abroad, to leave the country, was only granted to emigrants and those who had a special reason connected with the interest of the state. The travellers were few, but the customs officials and the guarding soldiers were many. The men on whose whim hung one’s final leaving were the sinister tall figures in new black uniforms.
When I was at last allowed to board the train, I rushed to the window to look for my parents, whom I could not see until I had left the customs shed. They stood there, in the distance, but they did not come to the train. I waved timidly, and yet full of fear, after the control I had just passed; but even that was too
much. A man in a black uniform rushed towards me, ‘You Jewish swine—one more sign or word from you and we shall keep you here. You have passed the customs.’
And so I stood at the window of the train. In the distance stood a silent and aging couple, to whom I dared neither speak nor wave a last farewell; but I could see their faces very distinctly in the light of the oncoming morning.
A few hours previously, first my father and then my mother had laid their hands gently on my bowed head to bless me, asking God to let me be like Ephraim and Menashe.
‘Let it be well with you. Do your work and duty, and if God wills it we shall see you again. Never forget that you are a Jew, do not forget your people, and do not forget us.’ Thus my father had said and his eyes had grown soft and dim.
‘My boy—it may be that we can come after you, but you will never be away from me—from your mother.’ Tears streamed down her infinitely kind and sad face. With a last effort she continued in the old, so familiar Hebrew words, ‘Go now, in life and peace.’
Standing at the window of the train, I was suddenly overcome with a maiming certainty that I would never see my father and mother again. There they stood, lonely, and with the sadness of death. Cruel hands kept us apart in that last intimate moment. A passionate, rebellious cry stuck in my throat against all that senseless brutality and inhuman cruelty. Why, O God, had it all to be like that?
There stood my father and my mother. An old man, leaning heavily on his stick and holding his wife’s hand. It was the first and the last time in my life that I had seen them both weep. Now and then my mother would stretch her hand out, as if to grasp mine—but the hand fell back, knowing it could never reach.
Can the world ever justify the pain that burned in my father’s eyes? My father’s eyes were gentle and soft, but filled with tears of loneliness and fear. They were the eyes of a child that seeks the kindness of its mother’s face, and the protection of its father.
As the train pulled out of the station to wheel me to safety, I leant my face against the cold glass of the window, and wept bitterly.
Those who have crossed the Channel, escaping from fear of death to safety, can understand what it means to wait for those who are still beyond it, longing to cross it, but who will never reach these white cliffs, towering over the water.
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