Sequence I: 0:35:36-0:36:59 mins.
[…]when I saw that, I immediately thought something bad
must have happened. So I walked faster. And when I reached the intersection, there
was an intersection close to where we lived and about here [gesticulates] was a
newsstand. We used to buy our newspapers and magazines from this newsstand every day
until this day, and the owner knew me. But he had newspapers piled up like this
[gesticulates], and it looked like blood had been spilled on them or like they had
been painted red. And it was the flames of the burning synagogues that had been set
on fire on the night of November
9-10. And there was a huge crowd of people in front of it. You see my
height, you know how tall I am, I had to crane my neck and still couldn’t see above
people’s heads. The newspaper salesman recognized me and came over, he stood in
front of me, hands on hips and said, “Hey, Jew girl, want to see how your synagogues
burned, do you? ”, he was from Berlin. I thought, “synagogues burned?” I didn’t know anything. We
had been asleep, no men came to our house, our house was not searched, everything
was okay. So I immediately went back home[…]
Sequence II: 0:43:49–0:45:44 mins.
We had to sell in 1933. But I was gone, I didn’t live at home at the time. And I didn’t
know the new apartment yet. So I went there. My father didn’t have any keys. I
couldn’t understand that at all. My father, an independent man. He rang the door
bell and my mother opened the door, and behind her was my brother holding onto her
skirt. And she said, “Abusch, it’s only Rachel,” Abusch was his nickname. “It’s only Rachel, you don’t need to be
afraid.” For one night, at one thirty in the morning, my brother had been woken with
an electric heater which stood on his nightstand. He only had a bed and a nightstand
in his room, his clothes were in my mother’s room since he had only half a room, a
narrow room. He had been woken with this heater, “Saujud [dirty Jew], get up!” He had a shock and lost his speech and
only stuttered ever since. He was terrified every time he heard a noise, and he had
seen my father [hit] by a stove handle,
that was the people who broke in with an axe. The first thing they did with the axe
was to chop off the handle of the oven door, it was an iron door, they chopped off
the handle and threw it at my father. He got a bruise right here. And my brother saw
all that! We didn’t have any glass, we didn’t have a chair, we didn’t have a t [able ]? – everything was gone! When I saw
that, I thought, I’m leaving. I’m not staying here! My father said, “Where are you
going?” “To Palestine!”
Rachel Dror (01153/sdje/0048). Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, June 20, 2012 (Berlin). Interview: Lennart Bohne, Daniel Hübner, and Barbara Kurowska. Transcription and editing: Teresa Schäfer. Chapters 2.5 and 2.7. (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-89.en.v1> [October 14, 2024].