by Mimi Schwartz

November 6, 2008

On Kristallnacht, 70 years ago this year, the synagogue was burning in my father’s German village. Many smelled smoke wafting through the windows. Someone heard Mrs. Lowenstein shouting, “Our synagogue is burning. Please, help!”

But the street remained silent. The only other voice was a man shouting, “Stay inside and shut the curtains!” People did as they were told — except for a few men from the Fire Brigade (including two Jews who were members before Nazi times). They ran to put out the fire, but strangers in brown shirts aimed rifles from a truck and said, “No!” Only when the house next to the synagogue started to burn did these “hoodlums from Sulz” (that is what the villagers called them later) give the command to use the water hoses to quell the fire.

The next day the whole village of 1,200 knew that the heart of the Jewish community was destroyed. The synagogue’s beautiful interior had been ruined: the dark wooden benches for 500, the delicate candelabras hanging over the center aisle, the carved wooden balustrade leading to the women’s section, and the ark for the Torah with its sacred scrolls. All was lost, people thought. And with it, the optimism of those who had believed their Christian neighbors who assured them that “the crazy house painter from Austria will disappear and things will be as before!”

When my father was born here in 1898, “Everyone — Christians and Jews — got along!” Or so he’d tell me often in Queens, New York, where I was born. But good neighbors or not, after this night, everyone knew that the Jews must leave 300 years of shared history if they still could. And all over Germany, as synagogues burned on this infamous night, it was the same message: Get out.

One night, a month or so later, a young Jewish couple in the village heard a knock on their door. They were frightened. And even more frightened when they opened the door and there was the local policeman. “Don’t be afraid!” he said softly. “I won’t hurt you. I have something to give for you.”

The wife backed away, but the husband said, “What is it?”

“A Torah.”

“A what?”

This policeman, it turns out, had seen the Torah lying in the street as the synagogue burned and thought it was not right — a holy book, treated so badly. So he took it home, a heavy thing, and dug it deep into his garden. When he heard that the young couple who lived a few houses from his was packing to leave, he hoped they might take the ancient scrolls with them.

The wife suspected a trick, but the husband thought, This man is a good man, a decent man I’ve known all my life! He told him yes, bring the Torah. The next night, another knock, and there was the policeman carrying the sacred scrolls like a giant baby wrapped in a blanket. A day later this Torah, hidden in a rolled-up living room carpet, was placed in a huge crate that the couple was shipping by boat to Haifa.

I first saw this Torah in 1973, north of Akko near the Mediterranean Sea in Israel. It was in a Memorial Room built by those, including the young couple, who escaped the village in time to start again. On the wall beside the Torah were the names of 87 village Jews who didn’t make it, weren’t rescued by anyone, and so were murdered in Riga, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz. I bowed my head to honor them, but as I looked up in anger and sadness, there was the rescued Torah. Its edges were soiled and slightly charred, and there was a knife gash; but its Five Books of Moses, saved by one honorable policeman, was open for all to read as before.

Years later, especially on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, I see this Torah in my head and wonder how many like that policeman it would take to rescue decency — in Baghdad, Darfur, Sarajevo, Gaza, wherever — from the ongoing fires of hate that consume it.

Mimi Schwartz’s latest book is Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, from which this essay was adapted. She is a professor emerita of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and lives in Princeton.

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