Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—was ostensibly an act of revenge against the Jews by Nazi loyalists. It seemed clear that the death of that young Nazi diplomat in Paris was nothing more than an excuse for the escalation Adele and I sensed coming months earlier. The violence was enacted by the usual suspects, the SS, the Brownshirts, rabidly infused young people who were indoctrinated in school and the Hitler youth program.
The chaos I heard was the sound of the SA smashing every window in the homes of Jewish families. One family was just down the street. They arrested the father and the eldest son and chased the mother and her young children into the street.
Adele had been awake through it all too.
“You should have called me,” she said. “We could have kept one another company while the world burned. Did the children sleep through it at least?”
“The older two did. Gisela had a rough night, but it wasn’t the noise—that’s just how she sleeps these days.”
“Perhaps she’s teething,” Adele said. Then she nodded to herself as she said weakly, “I’ll make her some rock cakes to chew on later.”
“You look so tired,” I said gently. “Have you seen your doctor lately?”
She huffed impatiently.
“He gave me some new pills. Always with the pills. I’m fine, but I’m eighty-six years old. I’m allowed to be tired every now and again.”
“I can’t believe you finally told me your age.”
“That settles it, then. I’m definitely losing my marbles,” she said, with a twinkle in her eyes.
As Georg and Laura dressed for school, I told them the bare minimum—there had been some violence the previous night, and they were to go right to school and come straight home. I couldn’t bring myself to explain that the violence had been against the Jews. I was terrified of watching them celebrate if I did.
Later, a sense of morbid curiosity drew me outside for a walk, with Gisela settled safely in her stroller. When I reached the house of the Jewish family at the end of my street, I was startled to see people inside. Through a broken window, I watched a woman cheer as she unhooked a painting from the wall. I recognized her. We’d chatted occasionally at the school gate—about this teacher or that, about the weather, about our children and their achievements.
Had she ever really been a cheerful and friendly acquaintance? Through the frame of that broken window, she was a vicious monster, feeding on hate.
“I had it first!” I heard a man shout. My gaze swung to an upstairs window, where I saw two men wrestling.
“I think you’ll findIdid,” another man snapped. I felt a jolt of shock to see that they were fighting over a wireless—an item that any family in our affluent neighborhood could have purchased with ease.
Every window in the house had some new horror to display. An elderly woman was sorting through a wardrobe, trying on someone else’s coats. A child was using a hammer to smash the glass in a display cabinet while his mother urged him on—a senseless act of destruction, given the door on the cabinet was already broken and neither child nor mother seemed to have any interest in the contents.
Almost in slow motion, I raised my hands to rub my eyes. Surely I was imagining this. Surely no force on earth could make otherwise sensible humans behave with such depravity?
An elderly man approached. He and I exchanged a glance, assessing one another. Maybe he saw something in my gaze, because he suddenly took his hat off and held it against his chest. He stood beside me, staring at the house, and a tear slid from his eye to roll into the lines on his cheek.
“They were my friends,” he whispered, his voice thick with tears. “The little girls were terrified. I tried to help them, but there was nothing I could do. Today is the first day in all of my life I have been ashamed to be German.”
The depth of emotion in his voice triggered my own. I turned back toward my home, intending to retreat to the privacy of a bathroom so that I could cry, but the day had not finished delivering its horrors. Walking down the street in perfectly neat lines were dozens of children, flanked by their teachers.
Laura’s class was at the front of that line, and she saw me first—by the time I noticed her, she was already waving excitedly. I approached her teacher slowly, swamped by a rising sense of dread.
“Out for some exercise?” I tried to keep my tone light, but I was unable to keep the tremor from my voice.
“Oh yes, Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. Today is such an exciting day for our class.”
“Mama, we are going to see the house that has been liberated. A Jewish family had been occupying it,” Laura said sweetly, her blue eyes alight with excitement. “Did you know we had a Jewish family so close to our house? It is scary to think, isn’t it, Mama? But they are gone now, so it’s okay.”
“Yes, Laura. It’s all okay,” I said. A Jewish woman was the second person to hold her when she was born. A Jewish woman was the first person she ever smiled at. Her very first word wasMay.“I’ll see you at home a bit later.”
I flashed a tight smile at my daughter, then at her teacher, and pushed the stroller forward, walking briskly home. But my footsteps stumbled just a few steps later, when I heard the schoolchildren cheer as they reached the ransacked house.
“The Jews are our misfortune!” they chanted in a singsong, joyous fashion. “They are finally put in their place!”
The violence continued the next night and into the next day. Hundreds of Jews were murdered, still more suicided. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps, the first time arrests were ever openly made on the basis of ethnicity, and the newspapers suggested that all of this had the full support of the German people. But I sensed a different sentiment in the air—that perhaps this time, the Nazi party had gone too far.
But no one said it. No onecouldsay it. We had so long been afraid of the consequences of dissent that even as the nation descended into madness, any moral call to rise up against the chaos went unheeded.