During the evening and day of Nov. 9-10, 1938, 75 years ago:
A bullet just missed a young man looking out a window.
A 9-year-old girl in her residence cowered while uniformed men pounded on the door.
A 16-year-old boy watched a mob loot the store owned by his family.
A rabbi was arrested while his synagogue burned, and he was shipped to a concentration camp.
All these Jewish people were living in different parts of Germany. All were experiencing Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, the state-organized, nationwide anti-Semitic orgy of looting, vandalism and unjustified arrests in Nazi-ruled Germany.
All of them have descendants now living in Milwaukee who have preserved some of their elders’ memories of that event.
Two of those descendants, Lorraine Hoffmann and Marvin Tick, are members of the planning committee for the Milwaukee Jewish community commemoration of that historic occurrence.
That commemoration is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 20, 6:30 p.m., at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 920 N. Water St. It will include the Milwaukee premier of Robert Krakow’s play “The Trial of FDR.”
The play’s imaginary trial focuses primarily on one of the emblematic effects of Kristallnacht, according to Bonnie Shafrin, director of the Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, which is organizing the commemoration event.
“After Kristallnacht, German Jews became desperate to leave,” Shafrin said in a recent interview. Among them was a group of more than 900 who booked on the German passenger ship MS St. Louis in May 1939, hoping to go to Cuba and from there to the United States.
(The ship should properly be designated “MS” for the German word “motorschiff” [diesel-engine ship], but it is often incorrectly designated “SS” [steam ship].)
Those passengers included the family of now Milwaukeean Philip S. Freund, who at the time was 8 and whose Jewish school was burned during Kristallnacht, according to his written account published on The SS St. Louis Project website (thestlouisproject.com).
However, the ship was turned away from Cuba, the U.S., Mexico and Canada and had to return to Europe. The incident has become “a prime example” of “the silence of the rest of the world” — allegedly including President Roosevelt’s administration — “toward the plight of the Jews,” said Shafrin.
From the perspective of 75 years, Kristallnacht was a key event in the history of the Nazi German regime, said Shafrin.
“I think it was the turning point in the Nazi pursuit of ridding Europe of the Jews,” she said. “It was the first nationally endorsed wave of violence against the Jews of Germany.”
Before that, Shafrin said, the measures against the Jews were legalistic and directed at “removing Jews socially, politically and economically from German society,” Shafrin said. Kristallnacht marked the beginning of “open and violent assault.”
But the people there at the time did not know and likely could not imagine that this event portended the murder of six million Jews. They only knew they were living in a nightmare that they somehow had to escape.
Harri Hoffmann, father of Milwaukee businesswoman and community activist Lorraine Hoffmann, lived in the town of Aurich. He was 27 and on Nov. 9 was in the home of his mother, who was suffering from heart disease.
During the night, his mother from her bed saw flickering lights outside the French-style window of her bedroom. She asked Harri to open the window and see what was happening.
As he looked out, a uniformed Nazi saw him and shot at him. “The bullet hit the window frame, ricocheted to the ceiling and fell on my grandmother’s bed,” Lorraine told The Chronicle.
Harri Hoffmann and Herta Goldschmidt married just before they were able to leave Germany in March 1939. In 1959, they visited Aurich and were able to show Lorraine the then-still existing bullet hole.
Hani Lustig was 9 and living in Augsburg. Many years later, under her Americanized and married name JoAnn Glickman, she dictated her memory of that night to her husband, Alan Glickman; and one of their four daughters, Cantor Karen Berman of Congregation Shalom, shared a copy with The Chronicle.
Hani was home alone in her family’s apartment because her parents were out taking English lessons as part of their preparations for trying to leave. The doorbell rang, and according to her instructions, she didn’t answer — “but I did peek through the slats of the kitchen window box and saw the Gestapo at the entrance to the building.” After pounding on the door, the Gestapo left.
The Gestapo also went to the home where her parents were taking their English lessons. Her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp.
Fortunately, her father was a World War I German army veteran, and an official at the camp recognized him as such. He was released after a month and told to leave Germany.
The family also fortunately had relatives in the U.S. who sponsored them. They arrived in September 1939, just as World War II was beginning in Europe. Eventually, said Berman, Glickman and her husband settled in Green Bay, where they became active in Congregation Cnesses Israel.
Siegbert Tikotzki, father of Milwaukee businessman Marvin Tick, was 16 and living in Berlin, where his family had a “high end” dry goods store. In 1994, he gave an interview to German author Horst Helas for a book on the Jews of Berlin.
“We looked out of the window [of the family home near the store and saw] men and women with axes and long iron bars which they used to break open the large wooden chests in my father’s store… The shattering of glass and this hacking was the only sound that could be heard,” he told Helas, according to an essay, “The Legacy Bearers,” that Marvin wrote for the 75th anniversary and shared with The Chronicle.
Fortunately, the family had applied to leave Germany as far back as 1934, Marvin told The Chronicle in an interview, because they thereby had places in line for the U.S. quotas of immigrants from Germany.
They received entry visas in February 1939. After settling in Decatur, Ill., they Americanized the family name to Tick, and Siegbert became Walter.
Marvin told The Chronicle that “I can’t separate [myself] from that experience” of his father’s. “It follows me everywhere I go…
“What my father instilled in us is the duty to continue the Jewish experience — to be active in a synagogue, support the Jews of Israel and be involved in things the Jewish community does.”
In Mannheim, Rabbi Franz Rosenthal was 27 and the spiritual leader of a large synagogue. On Kristallnacht, Nazis burned his synagogue and sent him to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
He spent almost a year there, but was released due to the intervention of a friend, Lutheran Pastor Hermann Maas. Somehow, the rabbi was able to leave in late 1939 and travel to New York City, where he met his wife, Harriet Finkelstein.
He served congregations in North Carolina, Mississippi, Michigan and, finally, Olympia Fields, Ill., where he died in 1979.
His two daughters are officials in Milwaukee’s Jewish community, Deborah Rosenthal Zemel as administrator of the Chai Point Senior Living Apartment Complex, and Hannah Rosenthal as chief executive officer and president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
In an email, Rosenthal recalled that her father “spoke about Kristallnacht and the Holocaust all the time,” and not only in his sermons. “I have often said that the Holocaust was at our dinner table every night.”
And in a brief essay she wrote for the commemoration and shared with The Chronicle, Rosenthal wrote, “The important work of HERC helps to ensure that 75 years later no one will have their businesses and homes destroyed, no one will be arrested and sent to a concentration camp simply because they are Jewish.”
Local attorney Franklyn Gimbel will portray the prosecutor in “The Trial of FDR,” with the rest of the cast being professional actors. Surviving passengers of the MS St. Louis will be attending. “Reflections on Berlin,” an exhibit of photographs by Bruce Gendelman, will be displayed at the event.
Chairs of the commemoration are Nancy K. Barnett, Bev Greenberg and Jodi Habush Sinykin. Chair of HERC is Betty Chrustowski.
For more information, call 414-963-2710, email kelseyb@milwaukeejewish.org or visit www.HolocaustCenterMilwaukee.org.
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