“Through the years I’ve hesitated to speak on this particular thing, because it’s a little bit emotional and very personal,” said Renate Frydman, founder of the Dayton Holocaust Resource Center (DHRC) and the member of a family shaken during an attack by German Nazis.
She spoke of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a series of organized attacks that occurred through the streets of many German and Austrian towns on November 9 and 10, 1938.
During a commemorative event held in the Creative Arts Center on Nov. 5 marking 75 years since Kristallnacht, Frydman said that her family was very fortunate to escape Nazi Germany. “It was a watershed event,” Frydman said. “However, for me, it was a second birthday.”
In 1938, Nazis in Germany torched and destroyed various synagogues, schools, businesses and homes, killing nearly 100 Jews. In its aftermath, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to prisons and concentration camps.
“We went to Holland and stayed with relatives for a brief time, then went to England, where my father found out his only brother had been arrested,” said Frydman. She explained how her father took the small amount of money he had and ransomed her uncle out of prison.
“My uncle lived to be 96 years old, and never knew my father had helped release him.”
She said he found out about ten years ago.
Frydman noted that during the attacks, none of the German authorities acted; rather, they looked on and even assisted in the rioting at times. Kristallnacht would later be described as the violent ignition to Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” and the shift of Nazi policies from nonviolence to something significantly more terrifying.
Another speaker during the Kristallnacht 75th Commemoration, author Gina Roitman, described her own experiences.
“So much of who I am as a Jew has to do with remembrance,” Roitman said, “but it’s not something I willingly embraced at an early age.”
Roitman described how her mother told her dark stories about the war, including one regarding Gina’s birth and how she had saved her daughter’s life in Germany.
Steeped in disbelief, Roitman gathered a camera crew and traveled to Passau, a German town Roitman’s mother associated with a deep paranoia and where a midwife had been rumored to have killed fifty two newborn Jewish babies. One of those babies, Roitman’s mother had told her, would have been Gina herself.
In Passau and the surrounding areas, Roitman discovered that her mother had been right. There had indeed been a midwife, a Nazi, who had pushed in soft spots on the heads of more than fifty newborn babies and killed them. Fearing the worst, her mother gave birth in another Passau hospital.
Roitman’s findings have since been composited into a documentary called, “My Mother, the Nazi Midwife, and Me.” It won a Make a Difference Award at the 8th annual COMMFFEST in Toronto.
“People in discussion ask me if I hold any bad feelings for the German people,” said Frydman, “and I say… I can’t have any bad feelings about it.”
“If you live with hate in your heart, it affects you,” Frydman said. “The devastation of the Holocaust goes beyond anything that has ever happened in human history, so we commemorate and think about it. We hopefully try to do something in our lives to make a better world.”
