November 9, 2008
'The Night of Broken Glass'
70 years have passed since the Holocaust began, but for Trude Heller, the memories remain
By Lillia Callum-Penso
STAFF WRITER - Greenville on line.com (South Carolina)
Trude Heller believes in miracles, but she doesn't depend on them.
Instead, the wife of former Greenville Mayor Max Heller simply lives each day with the thankfulness that only one who has experienced a miracle can. As a survivor of Kristallnacht, considered the start of the Holocaust, Trude Heller thanks God for those blessings each day.
Both Hellers will be on hand to commemorate the miracles that have touched their lives during the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht Nov. 16 at Greenville Technical College. Trude was a mere 15 at the time her family was forced to flee their home in Vienna, Austria, but she recalls it so clearly now that she can't sleep the night before or after she is to discuss it.
Insomnia is a small price to pay, she says. She has shared her story at schools and community gatherings.
"I think they think I'm too old now, they haven't called me," Heller smiles slyly. "Because every time they call me, I go. I don't want it forgotten, and there are so few of us left."
At 86, Heller looks a bit like every grandmother. Her face is pillowed by soft lines around her eyes and mouth, and her eyes seem to sparkle at the mere mention of any one of her family members. The first thing she does when you visit is usher you toward a family portrait, as if there is nothing about her life worth discussing more.
She peers at her beloved portrait, her gaze moving over each child, grandchild and great-grandchild before she settles into a chair. And then, sighing ever so slightly, she begins.
Miracle No. 1
It's funny what you remember about times of tragedy and strife. Heller remembers the coat she wore during her escape from Austria. It was brown with the detailing removed.
On a morning in mid-March, 1938, Heller recalls, she walked to gym class. It took about an hour for the class to end and for her to change clothes. It was enough time for her world to change.
The streets, which just hours before had been bare and calm, were filled with swastikas and marching German soldiers. The Austrians had voted in favor of merging with Germany, and life for Heller and her family as Jews would never be the same.
"It was a wonderful life until then," Heller says. "My friends were both Jewish and non-Jewish. It didn't even occur to me."
Next, someone came for their car and then their apartment, and then they came for Heller's father. By November 1938, Austria and Germany were engulfed by Hitler's ideals of a world free of Jews. Furor mounted, and by Nov. 9 mobs were roaming the streets attacking Jews, burning synagogues and vandalizing Jewish-owned businesses. So much glass was shattered during the two-day rampage that the night became known as Kristallnacht, or "the Night of Broken Glass."
"People have no idea that this really marked the onset of the Holocaust," says Marc Wilson, a rabbi and co-chair of the Kristallnacht event at Greenville Tech.
Heller and her family spent Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, in their family-owned tailor-supply shop, crouched beneath tables and locked inside with no bathroom. Outside, Heller recalls, she heard the sound of breaking glass and the angry shouts of people in the street. When the family emerged from hiding two days later, it was not to the Vienna that had been their home, but to a city where Jews were no longer welcome or safe. Through the eyes of a child it was all still very hard to comprehend.
But, they survived.
Miracle No. 2
Heller knows she was lucky. She survived and was relatively unscathed and untouched, even though her age made her a prime target for rape and assault. Not long after Kristallnacht she and her mother were forced by some local "young punks in uniform" to wash the streets. She knew some of them from school.
Heller stops here and takes a breath. She straightens slightly in her chair, clasping her hands together.
"When we got there, they sent everybody away but me."
The boys taunted Heller and began touching her. She's not sure what might have happened if a German officer hadn't come and stopped it all. Heller remembers that she cried for two days and two nights afterward.
"But nothing happened," she says. "Another miracle."
A personal story
Wilson worries that people don't really understand Kristallnacht. As with all historical events, the major players eventually fade, and so, too, does the memory. It's the reason Wilson and other community leaders wanted to commemorate the 70th anniversary this year with a program that is part remembrance and part education.
Local TV news anchor Michael Cogdill and actor and artist Shirley Sarlin will read excerpts from the diary of Werner Schleyer, a survivor of Kristallnacht and the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the Furman Chancel Choir also will perform. The event is less lecture than emotional journey.
"Really the purpose is to awaken the senses," Wilson says. "We know that the eyewitnesses are not going to be around much longer. We'll have recordings and we'll have oral histories, but we won't have the realities of the flesh and blood person for much longer, and that makes all the difference in the world.
"The fact that Trude was there and that Trude is so well-known to the community brings this dimension of closeness and personalness that really brings it home."
Miracle No. 3
After Kristallnacht, Heller's father fled Austria to Belgium. She and her mother later followed. The journey took months, including a failed attempt to flee to Chile and four failed attempts at walking across the German-Belgium border. But even in these failures, there were miracles, says Heller. Their Chilean visas were revoked at the last minute, preventing them from escaping on the ship, the Simon Bolivar.
The ship sank en route, killing all 500 people on board.
Heller and her mother eventually made it to the United States in March 1940, after a month-long journey by ship, through storms and hidden bombs, they made it to New York. And there, Heller was reunited with Max, her teenage love whom she had met while vacationing at a resort in Austria.
"My mother used to have a saying, 'The way you call into the echo, so the echo calls back,'" Heller says. "That to me really sums it up. I always felt like if you were good to people, they will be good to you. But that's not always true. Some are not so good.
"I don't know how to battle gangs or despots. There are still holocausts going on. It's just our miracle that we survived."
Miracle No. 4
Two weeks after Heller's Kristallnacht recounting, she calls to explain one more thing. In many ways it has nothing and everything to do with that time 70 years ago. In the message she leaves she says, "I just wanted you to know that we have three children, 10 grandchildren, and we're expecting our 15th great-grandchild."
She knows how easily it all could have been lost, And then, as if explaining why these of all things would be the facts she clarifies, she says, "It's just, it's sort of part of me."
YOU CAN GO
What: 70th Anniversary Commemoration of Kristallnacht
When: 7 p.m. Nov. 16
Where: Verne Smith Auditorium, Greenville Tech
For more: 864-901-8376 or MarcWilson1216@aol.com
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"That we will never forget"
"Thueringer Allgemeine"
09.11.2008 From Melitta THIELE
translated from German via Google Translation
On the night of 9 on the 10th November 1938 burned the synagogues in Germany. Even the house of God to the Jewish community in Arnstadt was a victim of fascist racial madness, which follow the majority of Jewish citizens Arnstadt would be assassinated.
The 70th Anniversary at the weekend Reichspogromnacht. A single, also known as the "Crystal Night" became known ranged from night to virtually all synagogues in Germany to destroy the economic livelihoods and the lives of Jewish fellow citizens erase. "That we will never forget" was the sound of Jewish music recites. For each was then seventy years ago have been identified, what disaster is in preparation. So it is important to remember what happened and not to forget, warned yesterday Mayor Hans-Christian Köllmer during the memorial ceremony at the memorial to the old cemetery. Actually the year 1938 would have been a good year for their 50th Year-old Jewish community can be followed instead of millions brutal genocide, said District Benno Kaufhold. Not imagine that something like that could ever repeat. But unfortunately, it Kaufhold, it is unimaginable in view of increasing neo-fascist activities "again today to imagine." That should not be admitted.
Already on Saturday evening was in the creek Church solemnly "A German Requiem" by Johannes Brahms listed. Bach Choir, Jena Philharmonic and soloists Radka Loudová-Remmler (soprano) and Felix Plock (baritone) ensured a convincing sound experience. In her speech pointed Superintendentin Greim-Harland that also helped Christian hostility to Jews, the catastrophe door to open. The path can only move away from an ideology of contempt towards greater respect for Judaism to be.
On both days, children attended ceremonies to commemorate the genocide. Before the concert Arnstädter Bechstein school students read the names of murdered Jews. Boys and girls of child and youth clubs of the Marie pen yesterday read excerpts from her radio drama production of "Shadows at Noon" by Margot Webb, because it is currently available for primary school pupils.
