Rosenfeld on Kristallnacht: The night life shattered

Harry Rosenfeld, who until his death in July at age 91 served as the Times Union’s editor-atlarge, was born in Berlin. This 2013 column on the Nazi attacks of Nov. 9-10, 1938, was adapted from his book “From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman” (SUNY Press).

In the middle of the night on Oct. 18, 1938, Gestapo officers knocked on our door and roused the household. They came to arrest my father for deportation to Poland, along with other Polish Jews. While Father was in Poland living with relatives, Mother cared for my sister and me and ran the fur business.

On Nov. 9, there was another knock on our door, this time in the morning and by someone well known to our family. His wife worked in the office of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. The man tore the nameplate off the door and urged us to immediately leave our home and take refuge in the Polish Embassy.

When my mother, sister and I arrived, the embassy courtyard was filling quickly with Polish Jews. It was a raw, cold November day. I ran around and played games with friends I spotted in the crowd. Every so often I saw open trucks filled with singing Brownshirts passing in the street beyond a high iron fence around the embassy. We remained in the compound until word came late at night from the Polish authorities that it would be safe to return home. We then walked in the dark, along with others who had taken refuge in the embassy. The sidewalks in front of the stores were littered with the broken plate glass that was to give the night its chillingly memorable name:

Kristallnacht.

When we arrived home, we found our apartment and shop undamaged. There are no certain explanations for our property escaping harm, but there are several possibilities. First, the Nazi gangs who committed the destruction generally came from other parts of the city, so they might not have known that our store, whose front was shuttered from top to bottom, was a Jewish establishment. Jewish businesses were commanded to have the owner’s name painted in large white letters on the front window. After Kristallnacht, our store’s shutters were not raised again.

Also, we may have been spared because the man who came to warn us had torn the nameplate off the apartment door. My sister much later surmised that our neighbors liked our family and did not turn us in to the Nazi raiders.

The next morning, I nagged Mother to let me go with a friend to see what had happened to the temple where I attended school after Jews were expelled from the public school. We walked past stores with shattered windows. At the Fasanenstrasse Temple, we saw the synagogue burning, smoke enfolding its massive Moorish dome. German firemen and their apparatus were standing by, at the ready, not to put out the fire but to make sure that the flames would not spread to nearby Aryan properties. A crowd had

gathered to watch in silence the desecration of a central symbol of the Jewish community. At its construction more than two decades earlier, it was regarded as a symbol of the confidence Jews had of their place in Germany.

Kristallnacht increased my family ’s urgency to leave Germany. My parents’ emigration application had been on file at the American Embassy since 1934. In the weeks and months following Kristallnacht we anxiously waited for our quota number to come up. The quota system was the key for acquiring visas to enter the United States. Finally, the day came in March when our number was granted. The Germans permitted my father to return to Berlin to accompany us to America. My immigration number was 6064, and the card is a cherished possession. The back of the card documented our arrival date in America, on May 16, 1939 — 107 days before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Rosenfeld grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Syracuse University, was an editor at the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post and came to Albany as the editor of the Times Union and Knickerbocker News in 1978.

A crowd had gathered to watch in silence the desecration of a central symbol of the Jewish community.