Kristallnacht -- Susan's Story

Susan describes in poignant detail her teenage years in Nazi Germany before her family left for Guatemala in l938. Intimidated and mocked by teachers and classmates, Susan cherished the courageous support of a significant few. Vulnerable, frightened, and critically aware of the encroaching danger, she was dependent on an adult world that seemed to minimize or even deny their precarious position.

It was a dark, sort of greyish day, hazy and slightly warm for November and somehow there was some kind of electricity in the air that we sort of had a feeling to stay at home, be cautious...Then after dark, my aunt with her husband came and they told us that there was already destruction going on outside...And then my mother...sent me out into the streets of Berlin on the night of Crystal Night, the pogrom ongoing then, to buy, believe it or not, pork chops, because after all the guests could not go without a proper dinner. I had to go to the northern part of Berlin to find a butcher shop that was still open [where they would not know me]...I was walking over the sidewalks with glass crunching under my feet and on the next street - Fasanenstrasse - the oldest synagogue in Berlin...was in flames. The firetrucks were then training their hoses on the neighboring houses, but letting the synagogue burn...And the entire sidewalk across from the synagogue was filled with hundreds of people...as if it was like a carnival to them...applauding and laughing...flames lighting up in the sky...and the people standing in the reflected light in the glow of the flame...laughing. I tried to walk past them in such a way that they couldn’t see that I was crying...Then...there were some brown shirts and they were beating up an old Jewish man with a long beard...and there were people standing around laughing and applauding...like a Roman circus...I came home and I was promptly sick all over the kitchen floor.

From the oral testimony of Susan Neulaender Faulkner, Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive, and published in The Persistence of Youth: Oral Testimonies of the Holocaust, ed. Josey G. Fisher, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, l99l.