Kristallnacht was the night it all imploded

By David Weichselbaum, as told to Tzivia Meth

Hessdorf, Germany. August 2022

I never dreamed I would go back to Germany. After fleeing the Nazis as a child, I had no desire to return to my birthplace. But here I was, standing in the yard of my childhood home. My grandchildren had been asking me for years to take them, so we arranged a six-day tour of the sites in Germany that were significant settings in my youth. Between my wife, children, grandchildren, nephews, cousins from Israel, and myself, we were over 30 people.

This wasn’t actually my first trip to Germany. I’d first gone back in 1961, on business. I was just starting out as an accountant, and one of my first clients wanted to open a business in Frankfurt. I told him he had to give me a day or two to think it over. But I didn’t want to lose the client, so I went. Years later, in 1995, I went back again, accompanied by my wife and grown children.

Now, we congregated in the large yard between my grandparents’ house and my parents’ house. On the outside, the house looked exactly the same as it did when I was growing up. That’s where I told everyone my story.

I was born in 1929 in Würzburg, Germany, and we lived in the nearby village named Hessdorf. It was a farming town, with only about 300 people and about 15 Jewish families. I can still see the farmers going through their fields with a plough. There were no tractors, and no one in the town owned a car.

In our little town, everyone knew who we were. My family had lived in the same town for over 250 years. My grandparents, all the way back to my great-great-grandfather, were butchers. We had a slaughterhouse in the town going back 250 years. But don’t picture slaughterhouses like they have now in Chicago, where they do thousands of shechitahs. In our family business there were one, two, three cows shechted a week. We had a wagon and a horse named Hilda, which we used to pick up the cows and calves from the surrounding farms.

Most people think everybody in Germany kept the same Yekkish customs, but it’s not true. My father’s parents made Kiddush like you do — they made Kiddush and then washed for Hamotzi. My mother’s parents, from the same little town, did the opposite: they washed for Hamotzi and then they made Kiddush. In fact, most of the towns in Germany had their own minhagim.

There was no cheder in town in my time. So, my brother Bert and I — he, all of six and a half, and I all of eight — traveled to the yeshivah in Würzburg every Monday and stayed for the week. We returned home on Friday. How did we get there? We rode our bicycles from Hessdorf to the railroad station, which was about two miles away, parked them there, and then took the train to Würzburg. We never tied the bicycles up, and for the year and a half that we made the trip, they were always there waiting for us each Friday. But when we came back after Kristallnacht, they were gone. That’s how we knew things had really changed.