Читать книгу Not Welcome - Sue Everett - Страница 8

The Growing Terror

The terror was stepped up with fresh business boycotts, which prevented people going about their daily work, and a prominent synagogue was deliberately destroyed by fire. Businesses were closing down or owners were being extorted to sell their livelihoods at a fraction of their worth. Unemployment among Jews was increasing rapidly, which was exacerbated by Nazi decrees that led to a significant proportion of civil servants being dismissed from their jobs, which were subsequently filled by Aryans. This included lawyers, doctors and then teachers as well as lower status workers.

Public degradation and harassment reached a climax with one particular episode that brought the reality of anti-Jewish hostility directly into every Jewish home. It occurred shortly after the annual Nazi party meeting held in Nuremberg. This was the infamous event of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938. The Nazis retaliated violently following the shooting death in Paris by a young Polish Jew of one of their officials, the German Embassy’s Third Secretary. The entire Jewish community was blamed as a pretext for the Nazis to begin their ferocious campaign to rid Germany and Austria of their Jewish population. The reprisals fired off throughout Germany, resulting in synagogues being set aflame, businesses destroyed and Jews humiliated, injured and killed.

Lutz and his family were aware of the increasingly hostile activities of the storm-troopers or ‘Brownshirts’ as they marched through the streets of Nuremberg, singing anti-Jewish songs and shouting out racial slogans. Their own business and home had been attacked on previous occasions by Hitler youth who threw stones at the windows and painted anti-Jewish vulgarisms on the adjacent walls.

The Brownshirts arrived at the Eichbaums’ home early one morning. The family could hear the storm-troopers wreaking havoc from a long way off, then the approach of stomping boots before they eventually arrived at their door. They had hoped to be spared in spite of hearing otherwise; word had quickly got around that no Jewish family in Nuremberg would escape the violence of the Nazis’ retribution. There was shouting and loud knocks at the door, stones were being thrown at their ground-floor windows. They had no choice but to accept the inevitable and open the door. The troopers burst past them scarcely giving the family a second glance. They wore uniforms boasting a swastika on the right arm and knee-length boots – six or seven of them carrying an assortment of tools – hatchets and axes. Lutz had been told to stay in his bedroom but he insisted they stay together; his parents had assured him that everything was going to be all right. They were all ordered to sit in the living room. They dared not show fear, not any emotion, just silently watching as the troopers went to work smashing mirrors, crockery and glass. The invaders moved on down the corridor checking each room until they came to Lutz’s bedroom. There was a mirror in his room and from their designated position on the couch they could hear as it was smashed to pieces. Ten minutes later the storm-troopers had completed their mission and moved on to the next Jewish household.

Afterwards, as Lutz’s father was sweeping up the debris, pieces of broken glass and crockery strewn around their home, Lutz must have wondered whether they would ever be able to put back the shattered pieces of their lives; certainly things would never be the same again. Lutz watched silently, staring dazedly as his parents cleared up the mess.

This event was a definitive turning point for the Eichbaum family – indeed for all Jewish families throughout Germany. The situation was about to get much, much worse and their days together were numbered.

After the raid Lutz’s father telephoned Theo and Adele as well as a few of their closest friends. It seemed that everyone had fared differently. The Eichbaums were surprised that they seemed to have got off relatively lightly and they hugged Lutz in their relief.

Lutz and his family’s experience of this night seemed somewhat different to his friends’ accounts. He remembers the storm-troopers arriving in the morning whereas most of the damage seemed to have been done during the previous night. It is probable that by the next morning the storm-troopers had run out of some of their vengeful steam and that saved Lutz and his family from a much worse experience.

The next day the school was closed, and they discovered the result of the night’s vandalism and looting, Jewish stores and cafés smashed and synagogues still burning; the almost deserted streets smouldered with the reek of smoke.

Lutz’s friend Liesl described her experience of being herded into the market square with hundred of others, freezing in her nightclothes in the harsh winter conditions. She saw people being humiliated and beaten; her uncle sustained a broken arm. Families saw their menfolk being forcibly removed and taken away in trucks. They later heard that they had been taken to prisons or ‘holding’ camps; twenty to thirty thousand Jews were arrested in this way and either released, if they had visas to leave the country, or deported to concentration camps. Those fortunate men who returned home were traumatised by their ordeal, their heads shaven, their bodies and minds physically and mentally ravaged. It became abundantly clear to all Jews that their survival was under threat. Daily life as they had known it had come to a standstill.

Many suicides followed these atrocities and it was this set of hopeless and diabolic circumstances that led Uncle Zion to his own desperate act of suicide on 16 November 1938. If there had previously been any doubt, this event was a blatant signal that the Jews had no future in Germany.

The events of Kristallnacht precipitated a sharp increase in the exodus of Jews from Nuremberg and throughout Germany. People were trying to find places of safety, first of all for their own children, then for themselves. Lutz’s parents were making preparations for the departure of their only son. Fortunately the Eichbaums had relatives in England who had left Nuremberg a few years earlier, Lutz’s paternal great-aunt Bertha and her son Hans. The Eichbaums were probably corresponding with these relatives and it was most likely that they were also planning for their own departure from Germany to the USA. The Nazi regime capitalised on this mass emigration by introducing ‘The Reich Flight Tax’ – a stringent property tax on émigrés, many of whom had to sell everything they owned to be able to leave their homeland.

Lutz was just sixteen at this time, and preparing to leave school. Jews were excluded from higher education and only unskilled jobs were considered appropriate by the Nazi regime. Employment prospects for Jewish children leaving school at that time were very limited; as a result many Jewish schoolchildren were already being sent abroad to complete their secondary and tertiary studies. In preparation for his new life, Lutz’s parents arranged private English tuition for him at home; he was a good student, which was just as well, as he was thrown into the deep end. His teacher couldn’t speak a word of German. By this time they would have been well advanced in their preparations for Lutz’s departure as they told him to be prepared for anything; they even gave him a tennis racquet which he packed in his luggage in the event he might use it in his future life.

In the meantime Lutz joined an import/export company owned by an acquaintance of his father. He worked in the packaging area, boxing up cigarette lighters and fountain pens. His employment was short-lived as just a few months after his sixteenth birthday his parents’ plans for his departure to England came to fruition.

Aunt Adele had recently become widowed and had already left Nuremberg, her eventual goal being to emigrate to the United States of America. She remained in Holland and Belgium en route, possibly staying with her paternal cousin Adolf in Brussels, living there for a couple of years until eventually reaching New York in August 1941.