The SS took over the camp in mid-1934 and often marched the prison-uniformed inmates out for the day to perform hard labor.
Arthur was released from Oranienburg in 1935, after suffering a heart attack, and was admitted to a Jewish hospital in Berlin. Shortly after his discharge, he came to the orphanage to see his son. This time, he gave Stephan a big hug and kisses on both cheeks as they were reunited, standing in the same hallway where father and son had parted two years earlier. As overjoyed as Stephan was to see his father, he found his appearance deeply alarming. Arthur was missing most of his teeth, and his once solid build had withered.
A friend had kept the tobacco shop running in his absence, Arthur told Stephan, but the new laws made it difficult for Jews to own businesses, and he was being pressured to sell out for a low price to a non-Jew. “People are taking advantage of the situation,” he lamented. Now he was back to living in a rooming house.
As they talked, Stephan could not believe how his father had changed. Not only physically, but he had a warmer, less stern manner about him.
Stephan had changed, too. In the institutional setting of Auerbach, the little boy who had always tried hard to please had become proficiently mischievous. He was rarely caught doing anything wrong, however, even when he carried off pranks like leading boys through airshafts to spy on the girls as they took showers. And for the most part, Stephan obeyed the rules. He also did well in his studies.
As a reward, in early 1938, shortly after his bar mitzvah, he became a shamus, which meant he would be responsible for opening the synagogue, which also served the local Jewish community, on the top floor of the orphanage. Each morning, Stephan reset the Torah scrolls for the day’s reading and turned on the electric organ to warm it up. The older boys at the orphanage attended services three times a day. They learned to conduct services, too, and studied Hebrew so that they could read the scriptures. Surrounded by their religion, they lived Judaism at Auerbach Orphanage—in Stephan’s case, more fully than he had at home.
The neighborhood school had a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish students, with the boys and girls segregated. One day, a group of adults entered Stephan’s classroom: a nurse, a doctor, a policeman, and a Nazi official, all in their respective uniforms. The official announced they would be taking “Aryan measurements,” and ordered all the Jews—there were ten or twelve in the class, most from the orphanage—to stand in one corner. The other forty boys formed a wide circle, with the adults in the center. One by one, each stepped forward so the doctor could use a mechanical device to measure the size and shape of his skull. The doctor made other measurements, such as the distance between their ears and the length of the brow and nose, calling out the figures to the nurse, who wrote them down in a book. They used a board filled with color samples to match and document the color of each boy’s skin, eyes, and hair.
Off in the corner, Stephan and the other Jews were ignored.
In the fall of 1938, Stephan’s father remarried. His new wife was Johanna Arzt, and Stephan had played a role in how the couple met: Johanna was the sister of the woman who’d brought Stephan home with her son on Sundays while his father was in the concentration camp. After Arthur’s release from Oranienburg, father and son attended several Sunday dinners with the Arzts, and it was at these dinners that Arthur and Johanna were introduced.
Stephan, starved for a mother’s love, quickly grew close to Johanna, a nurturing and kind Jewish woman like his mother. Soon, he felt close to her and was calling her Mutter without reservation.
By then, Arthur had lost his shop. At night, he went out to knock on the doors of old customers, taking tobacco orders. He turned these over to an Aryan tobacconist to fill and received small commissions. Johanna worked as a bookkeeper. They still lived in a tiny rented room, so Stephan stayed at the orphanage.
As he was returning from school one day in early November 1938, Stephan saw a banner headline at a corner newsstand.
JEW KILLS GERMAN ATTACHÉ IN PARIS
Stephan knew immediately that this was big news, and he dug into his pocket for the change to buy a newspaper.
A week earlier, more than twelve thousand Polish-born Jews, who had resided legally in Germany for years, had been expelled from the country. Forced from their homes in a single day, they were taken to the nearest railroad stations and put on trains to the Polish border. Four thousand were allowed into Poland, but the remainder were denied entry and found themselves in limbo, trapped on the desolate frontier between the two countries. They spent a week in the rain and cold, enduring a lack of adequate food and shelter. Then, on November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old boy living in Paris, the son of two Polish Jews who had been rounded up, walked into the Third Reich embassy there and shot the diplomat. He wanted to avenge the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, and his family in particular.
At the time, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, were reveling at the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which commemorated Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in 1923. Within hours of hearing the news, they had plotted a response. They viewed the killing—Nazi propaganda called it the “first shot of the Jewish War”—as an opportunity to unleash a long-planned, violent mass action against Jews. Later that day, Goebbels outlined to wildly applauding party leaders the nationwide pogrom that would become known as Kristallnacht.
Beginning at midnight, secret teletype messages from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin went out to military and police units across the country, ordering organized anti-Jewish demonstrations in cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany, encouraging the destruction of synagogues and other Jewish properties, and authorizing the mass arrest and detention of Jews.
In Berlin the next day, angry crowds filled the streets, chanting, “Down with the Jews!” Nazi gangs—many of them SA brownshirts in uniform or Nazis in civilian clothes—armed with guns, knives, crowbars, and bricks, assaulted Jewish men at random, made widespread arrests, and plundered and set fire to synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. Firemen stood by and watched as the buildings burned.
Early the next morning, a group of uniformed Nazis burst through the doors of the Auerbach Orphanage, taking the staff members, all of them Jewish, into custody. They went into the dormitories on the ground floor of the U-shaped building—one wing for the boys and the other for the girls—and rounded up the children, herding them all upstairs to the synagogue. The coverings on the bimah—a raised platform from which the Torah is read—had been ripped away. The holy ark where the Torah scrolls were kept had been torn off the wall, and other symbols were destroyed.
The terrified boys and girls filled the pews and lined up along the walls, waiting to see what horrible things the Nazis had in store for them. But the Nazis simply left the synagogue without saying a word, leaving the frightened children to exchange confused looks.
A few moments later, Stephan heard the jangle of keys and the sound of the door being locked from the outside. Then he smelled the gas. The eternal light (ner tamid), located in front of the ark and symbolizing God’s enduring presence, had been smashed; the gas line that fed the flame had been cut. A steady stream of gas was flowing through the broken pipe and into the synagogue filled with children. If they did not escape from the confined space—and quickly—they would all die.
Some of the older boys desperately tried to break down the heavy door, but it wouldn’t budge. When the children realized they couldn’t get out, their fear turned to panic. Many of them, crying and screaming, started coughing and choking from the fumes.
One of the older boys picked up a chair and began smashing it against the beautiful windows. Stephan and some other boys joined in, and working together, they were able to break out several tall panes. The openings
