Kristallnacht
LS: So, my dad walked us to school—he tried to walk us to school. We lived on the fourth floor, and we walked down the stairs and we opened the front door to the apartment house, and I will never forget the sight that I saw. It was absolutely horrendous. There was broken glass everywhere, all along the pavement. We couldn’t even—we could hardly open the door. And what we saw were these hundreds—looked to me like thousands of Jewish men. I could only see men. They were on their hands and knees, and they had little tiny brushes in their hands.
And standing over them were the black-shirted SS and the brown-shirted SA men with whips in their hands. And if these poor Jewish people didn’t clean up the mess fast enough that they had made, because they had smashed every store window that they could identify as a Jewish shop. And it was a very nice area; there were plenty of Jewish shops in the first district. And they just whipped them.
I was so horrified, and I remember looking at my father, who I felt could fix everything, and I remember saying, “Can’t you do something?” And he just shook his head, and he said, “There’s nothing I can do.”