I don’t know why, but Jews all over tend to commemorate the secular date of Kristallnacht — November 9-10, 1938. For me, though, the pogrom happened on the 16th of Cheshvan.

I used to daven in what was known as “the kloiz,” lead by Rav Breuer, later of Washington Heights, at half past six each day, and that was what I did that morning too. But to my horror, when I arrived, I found that the building no longer existed. It was completely burned down — together with my tallis and tefillin, which I’d left there the previous day. (In Frankfurt, boys wore a tallis from age six or seven.) I went home, crying. We didn’t yet know about the previous day’s pogroms in other German cities.

At around 9 a.m., a massive crowd of Nazis amassed in front of the yeshivah building opposite our house, out for blood and destruction. (It was Rav Moshe Schneider’s yeshivah, closed down by the Gestapo the following year yet providentially reestablished in the Stamford Hill section of London in 1940.) We watched, terrified, from the window of our ground-floor flat, as the mob entered the yeshivah, smashing everything in sight. Then they hurled out the Chumashim, sifrei Torah, and Gemaras, trampled them, and set them on fire. When that happened, we all tore kriyah.

Next they turned to our home. They broke down the door and suddenly there were a hundred brown-shirted thugs in our apartment, smashing everything. Right before our eyes, every window was knocked out, every cupboard and closet broken, each bed smashed to pieces. Feathers flew around everywhere as their knives slashed each eiderdown and pillow.

Our apartment had a very large foyer, and in it were six bicycles, belonging to us six siblings. As our home was being ripped apart, one young Nazi turned to me and asked, “Which is your bike?” I pointed, and he said, “Take it, and I’ll help get you out.”

I grabbed the bike and followed him. Outside in the street there must have been three or four hundred brownshirts, a huge mob, but he took me through, protecting me until we had passed the mob, and then I got on my bike and sped off. We lived in the Ostende Strasse, but I had an uncle and aunt who lived over the river in the west end of Frankfurt , so I decided to go to them. On the way, I passed several burning shuls, including the IRG shul where I had my bar mitzvah.

My uncle and aunt didn’t yet hear about the pogroms and the burning shuls and Jewish property. The shul near them was still standing — it was the only one left standing in Frankfurt, and it would even survive the war.

I later found out that the mob had taken my parents to the police station. My siblings went over to the home of another uncle, Hoffman, only to find that he had been arrested and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp that night. It was all unbelievable.

My parents were released after a few hours, and thankfully, my three brothers, two sisters, and I eventually returned safely home. We were astounded to find that one room in our home was untouched by the Nazi hooligans. The door remained closed and no one had stepped inside. It was the room with the sefer Torah. It belonged to a customer of my father, but for some reason it was kept in our home, and it was obvious to us that its presence had been a protection. From then on I vowed that if we’d survive this and if HaKadosh Baruch Hu would give me the means, I would always keep a sefer Torah in my home as a shemirah.

Our store, like all Jewish businesses, had a big sign on it, “Judische Gesheft” [“Jewish business”], because even before Kristallnacht, it was illegal for Germans to step into Jewish-owned stores. But even the iron shutters couldn’t protect it on the night of November 9th — the Nazi vandals drilled right through the shutters in order to smash the big glass window within. All the destruction was pre-planned and legalized, and what was also legalized was that the Jews had to pay for it. So not only was your property, your house, and your business ruined, you had to pay up the damages.

After Kristallnacht, new laws stipulated that no Jew could be employed by an Aryan, and no Aryan could be employed by a Jew. In short, no more parnassah. But that was really a mazel, because it forced many Jews to pick up and leave Germany. The problem was that borders of other countries were closed to fleeing Jews — in order to be allowed to move anywhere, one needed permits and affidavits, visas and guarantees. No assets could be taken out of Germany, so someone in the host country had to guarantee that they wouldn’t be a burden on the public funds. That law prohibiting transfer of wealth out of the German Reich is the reason that some very well-heeled families opted to stay behind. How could they just leave well-established business empires and valuable real estate behind, taking just ten measly marks in their pockets? In the end, of course, they lost everything and paid with their lives.

After Kristallnacht, the Jewish schools in Frankfurt closed, and people contacted anyone they knew abroad, begging them to guarantee their emigration. One of my sisters, who was then 13, a year younger than me, was invited by a cousin who lived in Strasbourg, France. Once war broke out and France was occupied, she was taken on a Kindertransport to the United States. Unfortunately, she was placed with a completely irreligious family in California, but although she was just a young teenager, she persisted in keeping a completely vegan diet in that non-kosher home. They meant well but kept nothing. It took three years for my mother, who made it to England just days before the war broke out, to arrange for my sister to be moved to the care of our relative Rav Shimon Schwab in Baltimore, his first stop after arriving from Frankfurt to the US.

The next one to leave was my older brother. In September 1938, a visa was arranged for him to go to England and attend yeshivah in Gateshead. Once there, he was slowly able to arrange for my parents and my older sister to come out of Germany to England too. They scrambled to safety in August 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of war on September 1.

We were distantly related to the Erlanger family in Lucerne, Switzerland, and in June 1939, they were the guarantors for me and my youngest brother to travel there. Finally, I too was leaving Germany.

We traveled by train from Frankfurt to Lucerne, leaving the German Reich for the freedom of neutral Switzerland. Soon, though, I was interned. Since Swiss men had been mobilized into the army, the policy was that refugees, including Jewish refugees, had to work for the country in labor camps. One out of the five labor camps provided kosher food, but as I was just 15, I was sent to a youth camp, which wasn’t kosher. I went to the authorities in Zurich and told them that I was religious and needed to be in the kosher camp. They refused, as I was too young. I said, “You can force me to go to a camp, but you can’t force me to eat there.” So I soon found myself in the kosher labor camp, paving roads together with Rav Aharon Leib Steinman and Rav Moshe Soloveitchik and a group of other Jewish refugees.

It was very hard work, ten hours a day out in the open, exposed to the elements. In the winter I always tried to get a work allocation with the team doing the drainage, since that was underground and a little bit warmer.

When I was released from the labor camp, I began an apprenticeship in order to learn a trade. I had wanted to become a watchmaker, but I couldn’t afford to study it, so I apprenticed myself to a furrier instead. During the first year, I was paid 20 Francs a month, and during the second year, 30 Francs. I also worked for the chevra kaddisha, doing shemirah at night — and that paid 25 Francs a night, equivalent to a month’s work.

Switzerland was neutral, so we could hear the news every day. I got letters from my parents, telling me how they were trying to settle and begin anew. In one letter, my mother mentioned that there were no arba minim to be found in England, because the war had stopped supplies getting through. I scraped together money to send my parents arba minim by air freight from Switzerland. The first year, 1940, this worked, but in 1941, despite my paying up-front, the lulav and esrog reached them two weeks late.

We did not succeed in getting visas and guarantors for everyone though, and that meant that one of my brothers remained trapped in Frankfurt. While I was doing hard, physical labor in Switzerland, at least I was safe. I became the middleman for mail between my parents in England and my brother left behind in Germany. They couldn’t correspond directly as the two countries were at war, so my mother wrote to me, and I wrote to him.

Of course, my brother had to be extremely cautious and guarded about what he wrote from within the German Reich. I had to read between the lines to understand what he was going through as the war progressed. In the end, in 1942, he was among the 11,000 Yidden deported from Frankfurt to Riga. From there, his transport continued to Grodno, where he was shot and killed. On the wall around the old cemetery in Frankfurt, there are 11,000 tiny plaques with the names and birthdates of those Yidden and the date they were deported. The plaques are the size of a matchbox — and on one of them is inscribed my brother’s name.

In 1947, it was time for me to leave Switzerland and rejoin my family. I traveled to England, found a job in Exeter as a manager in a fur establishment, and eventually ended up as a furrier in Manchester. Soon I was running my own fur business, but it didn’t take long for me to understand that a furrier is only busy from August to December, so I looked around and went into the handbag trade. On a visit to a factory in America, I was shocked when I saw how efficiently one person did in three days what 12 girls did in a week in my factory, so I bought the machine they were using and had it flown to Manchester. In three to four weeks, the profits had covered the extra cost of flying.

In January of 1952, a good friend of mine got married in Switzerland, and I went to the wedding. I was staying with friends who persuaded me to go to St. Moritz for a few days of vacation. Well, the holiday was very nice, but what was even nicer is that I met my wife there, and we’ve now been married almost 70 years, baruch Hashem.

And I’m grateful that I managed to uphold my pledge from 83 years ago: Yes, I was able to have a  sefer Torah written, as I had intended when I witnessed its protection on Kristallnacht. It was always in our home, an eternal shield of safety against foreign winds of all types.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 889)