The Buchenwald bluff

Kristallnacht. Across Germany, synagogues burned, shops were smashed, and some thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested for the crime of being Jewish men. In Breslau, my great-grandfather — born in the city in 1904, raised in its big, confident, integrated community — was among them. He was taken to Buchenwald, the concentration camp on the Ettersberg outside Weimar, where the November prisoners were held in the open and the cold while the state decided what it wanted from them.

What the state wanted, mostly, was for Jews to leave and to pay for the privilege; men could sometimes be released to a family that could prove imminent emigration. My great-grandmother — Breslau-born, twenty-eight, with a baby daughter at home — did not wait to be sent for. She walked into Gestapo headquarters in Breslau and talked her husband out of Buchenwald. Exactly what she said, the family does not fully know; whatever it was, it worked. The family treats the details as lost and the courage as documented.

Within weeks they were gone — husband, wife, and the daughter born months before the pogrom — out of Germany and to London, with what they could carry. Seven months later the war closed the door behind them. The grandmother that baby grew into lived to 2002, in Barnet, a Londoner of sixty years' standing.

My great-grandmother's own mother did not get out. Born in Rawicz in 1878, of the Posen generation that had moved west into German life and trusted it, she was deported from Germany in November 1941 and shot at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, in one of the first systematic massacres of German Jews. The same day, at the same wall, died another great-great-grandmother of mine — born in Opole in 1880, from a different branch entirely. Two women who never knew each other, joined by their descendants and by a date.