... And the Policeman Smiled by Barry Turner Read Free Book Online

sizeable Jewish population. Her parents, both with solid roots in the prosperous middle class, thought of themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Until Hitler’s arrival. On
Kirstallnacht:
    I remember being woken up at 1 a.m. Two Brownshirts were running about in our flat. My mother was crying. We were told to dress. I remember walking to a square in the town and being assembled there with lots and lots of people we knew. Many were crying. People had come from the hospital, old people. It was pandemonium. It was very frightening. It was very cold and dark. They were beating the rabbi from our town and they made him jump on the Torahs which they fetched from the synagogue.
    We were there for what seemed like an awful long time and then we were taken to a theatre. We were told to sit down, men at the front by the stage and women and children at the back. We were there, I think, from daybreak. During all this time they called up men onto the stage and made them perform like animals. They had to jump over tables, over chairs. All kinds of things to make them feel silly, and if they couldn’t do it they beat them. We were sitting there like at a performance. The women and children were sent home in the early afternoon. We hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. My father came home long after supper, at about 9 o’clock. He was over sixty so they had released him. The men under sixty all went to Dachau. We were lucky because we were together again.
    In every town, small or large, it was the same. Fourteen-year-old Ester Friedman lived in Vienna.
    My father had left early to go to the American embassy – one of many, many times – to see if there would be a possibility to get a visa to go to the States and leave Vienna. We were anxious, the atmosphere up and down the road was electric; we did not know why but a feeling of fear pervaded the air. I stood by the window – no sight of my father – but then it happened: a crowd of brown-clad SA men, with the fearful swastika arm band on their sleeves, marched down the road. I leant out further. They entered the old people’s home of the Jewish community. The windows opened and out flew books. The doors opened and out came the old people, being pushed and pulled by their beards as they could not walk quickly enough for the hordes of brown youths. When they had congregated in a heap of old decrepit flesh, they were made towatch their precious prayer books burn. And I watched. Buckets were brought and the ashes had to be shovelled by the old men and women. The youths and the crowds laughed at the sight. Water was brought and brushes and rags, and the old people were made to kneel and scrub the pavement. Beards were pulled until blood flowed, old women fainted – or died – I don’t know. And I saw. I smelled smoke. I turned my head and looked up the road. Our synagogue was burning – bright and high the flames roared – but I heard no fire engines.
    Late, late, my father came home – an old broken man, because of what he had seen and could do nothing about. He did not look Jewish and got away.
    Once the most tolerant of cities, Berlin had its share of violence and wanton destruction. Leslie Brent, who was enjoying education of a sort in a Jewish orphanage, believed that he escaped lightly:
    A mob stormed the orphanage and broke through the gates. There was a great
mêlée
with some of the older boys trying to keep the gate intact. Eventually it was broken into and the older boys just melted into the crowd and didn’t come to any harm. A good friend of mine, Fred, and I were terrified and we rushed up into the highest part of the building, which was the loft under the roof, and hid amongst the rafters there until the whole thing was over. I learnt afterwards that the mob had ransacked the basement and the ground floor including the orphanage synagogue and were just moving up a rather grand staircase when a teacher (Heinz