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Nov 2 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Eve Gill, Vienna, Nov 9, 1938:

"As I was walking down the road I met the young SS officer who'd taken over our store. He advised me not to go home. He wasn't too bad a guy actually. I asked him why & he just said, 'Well—just don't go home'. And... I did go home of course…"

1/9 ImageImage
"The door was open. There was this… officer in uniform. He took mother & me to the local synagogue. As you probably know on #Kristallnacht, famous Kristallnacht, they smashed up synagogues, set them on fire. There was one synagogue in the centre of Vienna they left untouched…"
"It was in the middle of some very precious buildings. They smashed it up on the inside to a degree. All the women & children from our district were there. This wonderful man with his uniform had a gun in his hand & he walked around & ordered people to sit & stand, face a wall…"
"Whatever he fancied. Terrifying, needless to say. We were there all day & night. In the morning they said they'd give us some coffee. We hadn’t had anything at all. There were people sick there & babies, little ones. They'd give us coffee but they hadn't got any coffee pots…"
"If anybody had any coffee pots… I put my hand up. Said, 'we've got coffee pots'. They sent me home with a guard. My mother had a shopping basket, she always lined it. I put the 2 big coffee pots in there. When I got back to the synagogue, my mother nearly passed out…"

5/9
"I didn't know that underneath the paper she had managed to hide some money. Which of course they found. But as I say, I'm still here. The end of the day they said we could go home. We started filing out. When we got to the door they stopped Mummy & me, & said, 'Not you'…"

6/9
"Go home & pack a bag. That officer has seen your flat, & he loves it & wants to live there. You've got to go. The store will be closed permanently.” So we went & Mr Rattengesicht didn't quite know what to do. What we packed, I can't tell you. I assume it was clothing & food…"
"They'd already helped themselves to things. Any valuables, of course. We didn't have much. Just a middle class family. My mother had some dresses or something. That had all gone & any bits of jewellery. So it was a bit hard."

8/9
The photos show Eve & her parents, pre-Anschluss + the family corner shop & 3rd floor flat at Schlosshoferstrasse dreiundfünfzig, Vienna + Eve during our interview in 2017.

Read more: ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk/RefugeeVoices/…

9/9 Image

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More from @AJRefugeeVoices

AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Nov 3
Walter Kammerling, Vienna, 10/11/38:

"Father was in bed; his first severe attack of angina. Somebody came to the door to arrest him & took my sisters too. I was in the other room. We didn’t know what it was. The famous #NovemberPogrom. The Nazis called it #Kristallnacht…"

1/8 ImageImage
"This is an expression I don’t particularly like to use because it has romantic connotations & it was absolutely not romantic by any stretch of the imagination. It was very nasty. Later I saw through the curtain, just across the yard, there had been a large Jewish flat…"

2/8
"…which had been taken away by the Nazis in the very early days. They put a local party organisation there. And Erika & Ruthi, my sisters, were scrubbing the floors there. I saw that through the window. Many years later I asked Erika 'What happened when they took you?'…"

3/8
Read 8 tweets
AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Nov 1
Isca Wittenberg's father Georg Salzberger was a Frankfurt rabbi:

"#Kristallnacht. We had a Jewish youth centre next to us. Huge glass windows. That was all smashed up. My parents weren't at home. We 3 girls were next door when this youth home was completely smashed up…"

1/9
"We were sitting pretty anxiously at on our own at home while this was going on. My middle sister, the calm one, said, ‘Let us knit or crochet or do things while this is going on.’ To try to calm us down until our parents came back again. But these were really terrible times…"
"In the night the synagogues were put on fire. No one came to put them out. People just stood around & watched. No police, no interference whatsoever. Then my father was taken to Dachau. He tried to hide but the SS tried to hunt where he was. They came day & night…"

3/9
Read 9 tweets
AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Oct 12
Gertrude Black, Munich:

"On the #Kristallnacht, the 9th November, my husband disappeared. I phoned my mother-in-law & said my husband hadn’t come home. She got very agitated & said he must have been taken away. He looked very Jewish. There he is, very Jewish, you can see…"

1/9
"They interned him in Dachau. I sat there with a child, really beside myself, nothing I could do. I was still breastfeeding & I was very terrible, alone with the baby. My parents-in-law sent my nephew; he was 13. You know it’s very eerie for a young woman, alone with a baby…"
"Nearly every shop in Munich had a poster ‘we will not serve Jews here.’ But neighbours would offer to shop for you & offer money. A whole lot of very decent Germans helped us. So I don’t have this terrible hatred like some do. There were very very kind people…"

3/9
Read 9 tweets
AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Jul 15
May 1945: After forced emigration to the USSR, Berta Klipstein returns to Poland.

"When our concierge saw us, that we are still alive: 'You shouldn’t be’, that sort of thing. There was a lot of antisemitism. We knew we couldn’t stay. It was just a stop, a transit point…"

1/8
"Soon after we left there were these dreadful pogroms in Kielce. Lots of that going on. But we were young, we used to meet my husband & other young people & go dancing. We had a nice time between us. It was such a relief to what went on before. But we knew it wasn’t for long."
"When Rabbi Schonfeld came that was an opportunity to go. My stepfather put my name on the list. I went to Warsaw to get a transport to go to England. Warsaw was just unbelievable. Not a single building intact. Ruins, & people living on the 5th floor. It was very, very bad."

3/8
Read 8 tweets
AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Jul 14
Postwar, Lili Pohlmann was brought to Britain by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld.

"He was the most handsome man you can ever imagine to meet in your life. He really was. You want me to smile? Tell me Rabbi Schonfeld; then I smile. To us, he was a god. A god came & took us out…"

1/9
"He did the most amazing things in order to get those children out. It was certainly not easy, to say the least. Where to get the money for it. All the bureaucracy that goes with it. But he had to get the children out from convents & non-Jewish families who were protecting them…
"Today they say that there are out of those whom he took out before the war & three transports after the war, 10,000 people around the world that he got out."

Lili came to London from Poland in 1946 on the first of Rabbi Schonfeld's postwar transports.

3/9
Read 9 tweets
AJR Refugee Voices Archive Profile picture
Jun 17
Vichy France, 1943: After her mother is sent to Auschwitz, Eva Mendelsson, 12, is hidden in a convent, then smuggled across the Swiss border.

"15 of us went by night, we were assembled. You only had what you were wearing. So therefore you wore 2 pants, 2 socks…"

1/8
"We were told to be utterly quiet, to do exactly what we were told. If anybody shouts 'Appla!’ we go flat on our stomachs & not to cry, not to do anything of that nature. We were good. We had a passeur, he’s the man who shows you the way."

2/8
"This 15 of us went across & had to climb what seemed a very high barbed wire. Could be a 12 year old child it’s different from what it was in reality. We were told when we get to the other side they will shout, “Halte là!”, and you stop dead in your tracks, or they shoot…"

3/8
Read 8 tweets

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