Vienna’s Yissachar Dov Kern revisits the childhood horror of Kristallnacht

Photos: Chaim Junger

Reb Yissachar Dov Kern stands in the middle of Vienna’s Heldenplatz, the huge Heroes’ Square, and points toward the once-swastika-draped balcony where Hitler yemach shemo stood before nearly a million people in March 1938.

While earnest tourists take photos against the backdrop of the opulent Hofburg Palace, a magnificent remaining symbol of the Hapsburg dynasty, Reb Yissachar Dov, 94, has a more immediate agenda than the Austrian monarchies. Together with his son Reb Shmuel Shlomo, we’re going back 83 years and beyond, to Kristallnacht and the time preceding that horror-filled night, to learn what it was like for an 11-year-old boy facing the unimaginable.

Despite his advanced age, Reb Yissachar Dov is one of the very few survivors who can still tell this dreadful story from its earliest days. He remembers Jewish life in Vienna before the war, the desperate efforts to escape, the escape routes, the concentration camps, and his own brushes with death. His living testimonies are recorded in his heart-stopping book, Lamrot Hakol (Hebrew).

We’re spending an unforgettable day together, as he — with his youthful spirit and vibrant demeanor — brings Vienna of the 1930s to life. Before the war, Austria was home to some 190,000 Jews, about 90,000 of them Orthodox — and the city of Vienna itself was about ten percent Jewish. Today, like then, it is the gateway from Eastern Europe to the West, and thousands of persecuted Jews found themselves a home there in the interwar period.

Vienna became home to a number of chassidic rebbes, and the city boasted some 40 shuls, dozens of chassidic shtiblach, and an array of chinuch institutions. Jews engaged in all types of professions, and some established huge retail chains (such as the still-popular Delka shoe store chain, whose name is actually an acronym for its founder, a Jew named Dovid Leib Keinan). On Rosh Hashanah, both banks of the Danube River (which served as part of an eiruv that encircled the largely Jewish Second District) were filled with Jews reciting Tashlich.

Reb Yissachar Dov’s grandfather, Yisrael Kern, came to Vienna in 1918, after several years on the run from Poland during World War I. In Vienna he continued the family’s previous profession as tallis manufacturer. His only son, Shmuel Shlomo, became successful in the leather business, producing leather belts and garters (the “Sport, Leather, and Apparel by S. Kern and Co.” is still around). The family were Belzer chassidim, and Reb Yissachar Dov was named for the Rebbe who passed away several months before he was born.

Yissachar Dov had a charmed childhood, growing up in a wealthy home with devoted domestic help and respectful neighbors. But then things began to change. He still remembers the chants of his one-time friends:

Jude Jude, Shpok in hut (spit into the hat) / Un zog di mutter (and tell your mother) / Dos is gut (that this is good).

When Jews began to flee from Germany after the Nazis rose to power, the Kern family’s home at Krummbaumgasse 2 filled with refugees. Talk of the impeding Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, mounted, and it all turned into reality on Friday night of Shabbos Zachor, March 10, 1938, when the Chancellor Schuschnigg announced his capitulation to the Nazis.

Reb Yissachar Dov remembers that fateful Shabbos: “My father was in such shock that when he picked up the Kiddush becher, his hands shook so much that half the wine spilled onto the white tablecloth. But he rallied, and the zemiros poured a layer of hope and consolation over us.”

It was ironic, because the Kern family had actually planned to be in Eretz Yisrael by then. Reb Shmuel Shlomo had made a scouting trip to the Holy Land in the early 1930s together with a friend named Eisen, and they jointly purchased a salami factory. But when Reb Shmuel Shlomo returned to Vienna and told his friends about his plans, they laughed at his naïveté, warned him of the spiritual dangers that Zionism posed, and persuaded him to drop the project. In the end he canceled the deal, yet his partner, stunned as he was by the pullout, carried on with the Eretz Yisrael plan. (The Eisen Sausage factory in Haifa has been a success since its establishment in 1934).