Remembering
Kristallnacht
Leo Rennert
Kristallnacht -- the Nazi pogroms that battered
Jewish communities in Germany and Austria -- came to the Rennert family not at
night, but in broad daylight.
Exactly 75 years ago, on Nov. 10, 1938,
rampaging Nazi goons battered our grocery story in Vienna. Display
windows were broken, goods were toppled from their shelves, and sacks of flour
and sugar were slashed to bits.
Our home was in back of the store, and it was
there that my parents, my brother, a visiting cousin, and I tried to keep out
of harm's way. Taking no chances, my mother opened a window and told my
cousin and me to jump out and make a run for it. Which we did, returning
a few hours later to witness the store's shattered remains.
A month later, our family left Vienna
forever. With only a few belongings, we made our way by train to Cologne,
from there by a local train to Aachen, and from there, along with a few dozen
other escaping Jews, we were led by a local smuggler through snow-covered forests
into Belgium.
We settled temporarily in Antwerp, where we got
exit visas to the U.S. Except they weren't operative until July 1940, and
Hitler invaded Belgium two months before that. At that juncture, my
father was detained by Belgian authorities and sent to France, where he was
interned (he was considered an adult German male, courtesy of Austria's
Anschluss to Germany). Two years later, he was killed in Auschwitz.
With more luck, the rest of the family managed
to remain in Belgium, where we were hidden in a Walloon village during the last
two years of the German occupation. In March 1947, we arrived in the
U.S. -- seven years later than we planned, but glad to be alive.
Looking back, all that began 75 years ago today.
But why does it still feel like yesterday?
Leo Rennert is a former White House
correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.
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