After our father lost his linen store, we had to move from the house where we had lived contentedly and peacefully. The store had been boycotted by the Nazis at the beginning of the Holocaust. In fact, we had to move several times to different areas so that we could afford to reside in our town. Our last apartment before leaving Germany was at Gymnasialstrasse 11 in Bad Kreuznach.
There were four floors in this building. We lived on the first floor and our private apartment included almost the entire level. Separate from our apartment was a small room and also a bathroom containing an old-fashioned bathtub held up by four ornate legs. This bathroom was for our use and for whoever lived in that small separate room. Our Jewish teacher, who taught all the Jewish children in our town because we could not go to public school anymore, lived in that room. I was very proud to have him living there because a teacher, next to our parents, was the most important person in our young lives.
Our kitchen was awe-inspiring. Perhaps it was not really as sizable as I remember, but it had a grand stove with a large, curvaceous, silvery pipe that extended from the back of the stove all the way to the ceiling. On this stove rested large iron pots containing mysterious foods and aromas that made my mouth water. The ceiling in the kitchen was high and cabinets with glass doors covered the snowy white walls. A large window with lace curtains looked out to Gymnasialstrasse. In the middle of the room there was a wooden table, which was used not only for eating our meals, but also by our mother to bathe our little brother. She placed a tin tub on the table, filled it with water, and “voila,” our baby brother, Ernest, had a bath fit for a king.
Our apartment had two bedrooms. The one where my parents and Ernest slept had two windows. One window faced Adolf Hitlerplatz, a square that was named after Hitler when he first came to power in 1933. The other window faced Gymnasialstrasse. My brother Joe and I slept in the second bedroom. It was through the window of that bedroom that Joe saw our neighbors throwing the bricks and rocks on the night of November 9-10, known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. It was through that window that he saw the policeman standing on the outskirts of the rock-throwing crowd and doing nothing to stop them.
Separating the two bedrooms was an ornately decorated hallway arranged with mosaic tiles in black and white, interspersed with flamboyant flowers. At the end of this hallway was a door to get to the outside of the building facing Gymnasialstrasse. I cannot remember why we never used this door to go outside. It was made with vibrant, multicolored glass—with flaming crimson, lush lavender, verdant green, and salmon pink panels. Our way of exiting our apartment was at the other end of our hallway, through another door also made with glass panels. However, these panels were a simple frosty white. It was through the stained-glass door with the multitude of colors that our neighbors smashed a lamppost they had uprooted from the Adolf Hiltlerplatz on the Night of Broken Glass. The glass was strewn all over the hallway.
The rabbi and his family lived on the second floor of our apartment building. My brother and I were good friends with his children. The oldest son, Meyer, taught me how to ride a bicycle in the sprawling garden surrounding our house. It was filled with gooseberry bushes. I adored picking and eating the crunchy, sour berries. The ground was soft from all the tilling and planting. Meyer comforted me when he said that if I fell off the bicycle I would not get injured. On Kristallnacht, the same crowd that shattered our apartment also destroyed the rabbi’s home and arrested him on his balcony so that the neighbors could all see this humiliating event.
On the third floor lived a non-Jewish family. Joe later told me that they provided my baby brother with milk when we were hiding on the fourth floor, which was the building’s attic. It was a good place for hiding after the Night of Broken Glass.
Before the Night of the Broken Glass, we simply walked out the door and turned to the right in order to attend our synagogue. We turned left if we wanted to go to the Kurhaus, the lavish hotel surrounded by gardens, and the Salinen where people sat on wooden benches to breathe in air from the cascade of water, laden with sulfur, that splashed down from a large height of wooden branches. German citizens visited this spa and breathed in the air to cure themselves of all kinds of diseases. The Jewish community was not allowed to go there anymore.
Across the street from Gymnasialstrasse 11 was the park where I learned firsthand about antisemitism. The gatekeeper and his daughter called me a dirty Jew and other names and threw rocks at me when I was trying to enter the park. They did this to me for the simple reason that I was a young Jewish girl.
After antisemitism became rampant in Germany, my family had to find a way to get out of the country and find a new way of life.
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I returned to Bad Kreuznach and Gymnasialstrasse in 1971 when my three daughters were teenagers to show them where I had lived as a young girl. Even though much of Bad Kreuznach was bombed by the American Army Air Corps during World War II, the house was still there. It looked much smaller than I remembered. The steps to the door that was smashed in by our neighbors were no longer there. There was no way that anyone could reach the plain door that had replaced our elegant stained-glass door. However, the other entrance to the building was still intact, just the way it was when I left the building as a nine-year-old girl. We could stroll to the right, the left, and across the street. We entered the building and rang the doorbell to our old apartment. A German lady opened the door, I introduced myself, and she reluctantly let us enter her home. To my dismay, the beautiful mosaic floor in the hallway was covered with wall-to-wall green carpet. At the end of the hall, where the smashed, stained-glass door had stood, was a very ordinary door that did not seem to go anywhere. We soon left since the lady seemed very uncomfortable having me there. The year 1971 was still a time when the German population did not want to talk about their parents’ and grandparents’ collaboration with the Nazis.
In September 2008 I returned to Bad Kreuznach with my baby brother, Ernest, who was then 70 years old. He was on a business trip for NASA to meet with other space-agency representatives about how international collaboration on measurements of the Earth’s environment from space would benefit everybody. Bad Kreuznach was very near where his meetings were taking place. I wanted to show him where he had lived when he was a baby. Driving into Bad Kreuznach, I had no trouble finding Gymnasialstrasse 11. And I was happy to see that Hitlerplatz had been changed to Schlossplatz. However, now there was a large sign, almost the size of a billboard, that informed us that the building would be renovated and made into condominiums.
Gymnasialstrasse 11 in disrepair, taken in 2008. Courtesy of Ernest Hilsenrath
The house was in disrepair. The shutters were closed, and the windows and walls on the outside needed to be painted. The garden looked like it had not been taken care of in a few years. It appeared like a jungle that was overgrown with weeds and the trees were screaming to be pruned. The gooseberry bushes were gone, as was the tilled soil where I had fallen off my bike. The building was locked and abandoned. We tried to find an entrance and finally found one in the area where the rabbi’s balcony had collapsed from the second floor to the ground below. We could crawl through a little open space of the boarded area where our apartment had been located. It was gutted and unrecognizable.
Gymnasialstrasse 11 after renovation, taken in 2020. Courtesy of Ernest Hilsenrath
The house on Gymnasialstrasse 11 has now been sold and renovated. The profits from the sale were used to build a new synagogue in the outskirts of Bad Kreuznach. The old house has been renovated and modernized and is being used as an office building for doctors and lawyers.
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