Thread by @AJRefugeeVoices

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

"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

" She just shook her head & didn’t say a word. I didn’t pursue it any further. That day… Shops were looted again. Things were taken, things smashed. All the synagogues were burnt. In Vienna there were about 90 synagogues & prayer houses. There's only one that wasn't set alight."

"Now they have published books & other things where they recreate—electronically—all the synagogues they destroyed, but it doesn’t really help much. A few weeks before I was also told to scrub the streets. It was a young man, obviously Hitler Youth, with the hakenkreuz armband."

"He wouldn’t let us do it kneeling down; we had to do it crouching down. That was his very special fun, you know? An old chap next to me fell over. He started kicking him & abusing him & shouting at him. When I quickly looked up, I saw a smile going through the watching crowd…"

"There was one lady right at the back. That sticks in my mind. She held her little girl up, so that she could see better how that old chap was kicked. And smiled. And that, as I say, sticks in your throat a bit."

7/8

The photos show Walter's passport photo, 1938 + sister Erika, England, 1939. "She was the only other one from our family that managed to get out" + Walter during our interview, 2016.

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