The window of the pawnshop on Second Avenue had not been washed in a long time. Peeled black paint showed ridges of rust on the heavy iron frame that surrounded the window, and only the three globes hanging above the doorway appeared to have received any maintenance care.
The apartment on Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side is steamy in the sweltering heat of July. Odd smells waft from the old furniture; the dark brown wood casts a depressing mood over the crowded room. Only a single bright square—crisscrossed by shadows of the fire escape—illuminates the floor, its shellac worn by generations of tenement dwellers. Emma kneels on the floor and tries to concentrate on her book.
How do you describe a little town you loved when you were young? I never thought of it as a little town. It had everything. I lived with my father, mother, and sister. I went to school, played there, and had lots of friends. I also had my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins nearby.
The skeletal figures descended the white buses with uncertainty and in bewilderment looked around at the throng of civilized human beings awaiting their arrival.
I still hoped that Mother would show up in one of the forests that abounded in that area of Poland. It was autumn of 1942. At that time I believed that this nightmare was temporary, and that any day I would find Mama. Had I thought differently, I would have given up.
After Kristallnacht, I returned to my hometown in Bremen, in northwest Germany. A number of Jews had been released from concentration camps. I had been set free after eight days of imprisonment. I was then in Würzburg, Bavaria, where I had gone to school. The Nazis called these arrests “protective custody.” From whom did we need protection?
About two weeks after Kristallnacht, my father and I returned to our house in Bremen. During that fateful night, my father had fled over the roofs and had been hiding with family in Hamburg. He was lucky, for if he had been found at home, he would certainly have been taken and sent to a concentration camp like my brother and all other men. I had met my father again in Hamburg when I was released from imprisonment in Würzburg.
It was the summer of 1997 when I received an unexpected letter and a picture from a former non-Jewish playmate. The picture had been taken by a street photographer and was of a group of neighborhood youngsters near where we lived in Bremen, my hometown. We boys were then about 10 or 15 years old. It was taken shortly before Hitler came to power, when Jewish and non-Jewish children still played together.
The letter had been sent to Bertl, my sister, by Reinhart Lochmann in September 2000. In his letter he described the special program he was planning to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews from Adelsheim and Sennfeld, Germany, to camps in southern France.
I stood at the front of the classroom facing my students, who were themselves teachers within the same school district as I was—Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. They had enrolled in the summer in-service class for teachers to study the history of the Holocaust, as well as to learn methods for teaching this history to their own students when they returned to their classrooms the following fall.
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.
