Zoom reunites Holocaust survivors
Woman thought friend was gone forever.
The 9-year-old girls met in the schoolyard near their Berlin homes to say goodbye.
Ilse Betty Grebenschikoff and Anne Maria Wahrenberg were best friends who leaned on one another during the early days of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish campaign. In 1939, both of their families were preparing to flee Germany for different destinations.
Grebenschikoff and Wahrenberg embraced, cried and promised to find one another some day.
As the years passed, they each thought the other had not escaped and was among the millions murdered in the Holocaust. But neither stopped searching.
At 91, Grebenschikoff, who goes by Betty, has lived in St. Petersburg for about a decade.
They had each other
The friends met when they were 6 and seated next to one another in school. They were inseparable. They played in the park, went to the movies, worshipped at the same synagogue and and took ballet classes together.
Then came the rise of the Nazis. “It was dangerous because the other children, who were not Jewish, who we used to play with turned on us,” Grebenschikoff said. “They were brainwashed to hate us.”
Those former friends, she said, pushed her into the gutter and threw stones at her.
“It was hard,” Grebenschikoff said, but at least she still had her best friend. “We couldn’t go the park or theaters anymore, so we stayed in each other’s apartments. We played dress up. We pretended to be American movie stars. We played games. We ate too much candy. We drove our mothers crazy.”
While they were aware Germany was becoming hostile to Jews, Grebenschikoff said neither initially grasped the severity. But then came Nov. 9, 1938, Crystal Night, also called the Night of Broken Glass. It was named for the broken glass that littered German streets after Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were smashed as tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested.
“We sat on our apartment floor during Crystal Night,” Grebenschikoff said. “We turned off the lights and my parents told us not to make a sound so that our neighbors who were not Jewish would not denounce us.”
Wahrenberg’s father was among those arrested. He was released weeks later, but Grebenschikoff does not know why. The Wahrenbergs
were certain he would be arrested again, she said, and the Grebenschikoffs knew it was only a matter of time before all Jewish residents were targeted.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Grebenschikoff said. “My dad began looking for a way out.”
He bribed a shipping company for tickets from Italy to Shanghai, China, which, as a city accepting immigrants without papers, would become home to 20,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
“We were told to say goodbye to relatives,” Grebenschikoff said. “Everybody was crying.”
Her dad took her to the schoolyard to see Wahrenberg one final time. They promised to write letters.
Grebenschikoff’s family boarded a train for Italy on March 19, 1939, two days before her father was to appear before the Gestapo.