FOREWORD

      The testimonies to the pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938 and its sequels, assembled in this volume, describe what the authors deemed to be the height of Nazi barbarism. In reality, these events were but the faintest of preludes to what was about to happen to the Jews in Germany and in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, these reports carry a poignancy of their own that overwhelmingly evokes the suffocating and terror-filled atmosphere of Jewish everyday existence under the Reich during those November days and the immediate pre-war months.

      These texts were written one or two years at most after the events and the countless details they relate, often vividly rendered, fit into the overall historical picture that we know so well today. Minor mistakes of interpretation in fact add to the sense of complete authenticity carried by each of these testimonies. They tell of the organized nature of these ‘outbursts of popular anger’, of the relentless and thuggish savagery of the SA, SS and Hitler Youth involved in the orgy of destruction and humiliation; they tell of the sheer perversity of the perpetrators and of their inventiveness: an old lady, for example, forced under SA supervision, hammer in hand, to herself destroy all the precious objects in her apartment; and much worse of course. But many of the witnesses also stress that Germans in different walks of life appeared embarrassed by the savagery of the regime and, at times, did not hesitate to express their empathy for the suffering of their Jewish neighbours. The voices of some of these German supporters (Marie Kahle and her family, among others) are included in the volume.

A few of the narratives offer lighter moments in the midst of the overall gloom. For instance, one cannot but be pleased in imagining the adventurous escape of Rudolf Bing and his wife from their house in Nuremberg as they slid down from their bedroom window on tied sheets while the mob was breaking down their front door. Generally, however, the narratives dwell on quite different scenes: the groups of Jews huddled in the waiting-room of the Berlin Bahnhof am Zoo, because these railway-station waiting-rooms remained some of the rare public places to which access was not yet forbidden to Jews; the endless queues of Jewish women in front of foreign consulates, as male Jews in their tens of thousands had been arrested and shipped off to camps – Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Much has been written about camp existence, even during the pre-war period, yet the wave of sudden arrests of Jews, about 40,000 of them, created new and unexpected conditions in which the sadism of the SS guards found an ideal outlet. The constant beatings for every and any reason, the hours-long roll-calls in freezing weather, the repeated ‘exercises’, which on each occasion left a few of the old and sick inmates dead, the cramped barracks, the lack of food, the torturing thirst and the one constant fixation: How fast would getting a visa lead to release from the camp and allow quick departure from the country?

      At times, a few inmates themselves drifted towards very problematic choices. Thus, Kurt Lederer, a Viennese physician, arrested and sent to Buchenwald before November 1938, improvised a small ‘subcamp’ in one of the buildings, in which, with the help of the camp authorities, he kept mentally ill inmates to avoid additional chaos among the prisoners; at one point, he was in charge of 150–60 people. As controlling the mentally ill without adequate medicine became increasingly difficult, one of the SS guards offered help: the physician could choose twenty of the most difficult cases and hand them over. He did. Ultimately, some thirty-five patients disappeared: they were ‘killed in the bunker’. Did the physician foresee this outcome? Thus, even in these early testimonies, we at times approach that ‘grey zone’ which Primo Levi described many decades later when reflecting on human behaviour in the death camps.

      In this volume, over and above the bare facts, readers will discover an extraordinary array of details about Jewish attitudes, perceptions, and reactions during these fateful months. They will grasp a wealth of aspects defining the atmosphere that suffused the world of central European Jewry in the penultimate phase of its existence, moments before its final doom.

      Saul Friedländer