Free I Am a Star by Inge Auerbacher Page A

hundred miles away. Her father was also a cattle dealer. Papa’s parents had died a few years before his marriage to Mama. Three of Papa’s married sisters lived in different parts of Germany, and the fourth lived in France. Two sisters had two children each. They were my older cousins Hella, Werner, Heinz, and Lore. Mama’s only brother was married and lived a few hours away.
    NOVEMBER 9, 1938
    It was a cold morning in November,
A day that I will always remember.
We were awakened from a peaceful sleep,
The flames of terror had begun to leap.
“Open the door, police, let us in;
Don’t run or hide, you cannot win!”
We had avoided the truth and closed our eyes,
The knock on our door had caught us by surprise.
“All Jewish men are now under arrest,
Report to City Hall and join the rest!”
Grandpa attended services each day,
Now, from his prayers he was torn away.
The train rolled on toward incarceration,
Dachau, barrack number sixteen, their destination.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI 1 was their only greeting,
To hide the reality they would be meeting.
They wore blue and white striped uniform,
Beaten and hungry they faced the storm.
In the village only women and children were left,
Followed by rampage of tremendous ruin and theft.
Our temple became the prime target of hate,
Mama saw tablets ripped from their normal state.
The Commandments lay broken on the ground,
Heralding darkness with their crushing sound.
Broken glass crashing, echoed all day,
Our house was no place for us to stay.
In our living room, a stone grazed my head,
We ran for shelter in a backyard shed.
The volcano had exploded and begun to spew,
In its path lay the destiny of every Jew.
    Berthold Auerbach (Moses Baruch Auerbacher), a member of my family, was one of Germany’s most beloved folk writers. He lived from 1812 to 1882, and his stories of the Black Forest made him world famous. Berthold Auerbach was born and lived in Nordstetten in southern Germany, which was where my family came from.
    We were a happy community in Kippenheim until the sound of marching boots shattered the peace of our tranquil village. A massive riot took place on November 9, 1938. That event is called Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. It marked the beginning of terror that would continue for seven years. I was then only three years old.

CHAPTER 2

    The Roots of Hatred
     
     
    A nti-Semitism, or hatred of the Jews, has existed throughout the history of the Jewish religion. Many people disliked Jews because they had different customs and because they refused to become Christians. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a new type of anti-Semitism began to emerge. Some people began to say that Jews belonged to a different race and that Jews were racially inferior to Christians.
    But who are the Jews and why did they inspire such feelings? Their origins can be traced to the patriarch Abraham, the father of a Semitic tribe of shepherds and farmers, whose revolutionary belief in the existence of one supreme God became the foundation of three great religions. The history of the Jews goes back almost four thousand years to their arrival in the biblical land of Canaan that was later called Palestine and today is called Israel. The Ten Commandments given by God to Moses serve as the basis for their religion, Judaism. Today there are people who follow this religion in almost every country in the world.
    The Jews arrived in Germany about sixteen hundred years ago, around A.D. 400. They came from the Mediterranean region as traders following the Roman armies. From about A.D. 1096, during the time of the Crusades, which were Christian military expeditions that set out to recover the Holy Land from the Moslems, life became very difficult for the Jews living in Germany and other parts of Central Europe. The Crusaders offered the Jews the choice of baptism or death. “To sanctify the Name of God,” they slaughtered thousands of Jews who refused to