Suse Rosenstock, in a 1991 interview, tells her story.
By: Hank Kalet
Editor’s note: The following story was originally published in The South Brunswick Post in 1991 and an updated version was published in September 1996 in a special supplement on the exhibit "Anne Frank In the World: 1929-1945." Ms. Rosenstock died Tuesday, April 9.
They came and they destroyed.
Up in the attic, the Jewish family listened to the sounds of breaking glass and broken lives, cowering as the Germans systematically destroyed everything they knew.
"The morning of Nov. 10 (1938), my father was saying Kaddish for my grandparents," Monmouth Junction resident Suse Rosenstock said in 1991. "He had gone to synagogue and he came home very quickly and said ‘you don’t have to go to school today, the synagogue is on fire.’ "
It was Kristallnacht, "The Night of Breaking Glass." For two days, Nov. 9 and 10, the Germans went from house to house smashing what they could find, demolishing not just the belongings but the lives of their Jewish neighbors.
It would not be long before the Jews would be herded into cattle cars and shipped to places such as Auschwitz and Birkenau, concentration camps where 6 million Jews and 5 million others, deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime would perish, including Ms. Rosenstock’s father.
Ms. Rosenstock was spared, thanks to the Kindertransport program, which arranged homes in Great Britain for about 10,000 Jewish children. In 1947 she was reunited with her mother and sister, both of whom survived the brutality of the camps.
Ms. Rosenstock used to retell the story as often as she gots the chance, speaking to students at schools throughout the state and to church and other community groups in an effort to keep the horror that was the Holocaust from becoming just another story in a history book.
"A lot of people can’t talk about it, but I think it needs to be talked about," she said. "I think I must be the last generation of those who were eyewitnesses."
Ms. Rosenstock, whose maiden name was Herz, measured her words as she retells her story, letting the events unfold simply.
They had lived in an apartment above their father’s hardware store in Worms, Germany. When the Nazis came, Mrs. Herz gathered Suse, then 7½, and her sister Edith, then 12, and ran up the stairs to the neighbors who lived above them.
"They let us in, but told us that we couldn’t stay because the son was a Hitler youth and the family would be in big trouble," she said. "So we caught our breath and went upstairs to the attic.
"We just cowered there and hid there," she said. "My mother was furious you can imagine, it was our house, our whole life, and we could hear things being smashed to smithereens. She wanted to go downstairs and stop them but my sister Edith and I hung onto her and said ‘don’t go because what will we do without you?’ "
The three of them stayed in the attic several hours until the crashing noises ceased. It was cold in the attic and they were unable to move for fear of drawing attention to themselves. They also were without food and drink, "although just a few feet away was the cupboard where my mother stored the jars of fruit for the winter."
It was late afternoon when they finally emerged from the attic. "We went down and not one piece of glass remained," she said.
"Our belongings were lying on the street, on the tram lines. The stove, the potbellied stove we heated our house with, the Nazis had thrown out."
Soon after, two Nazi Brown Shirts appeared in the door, shoved her sister aside and asked for their father. The girls answered that they didn’t know where he was and the Brown Shirts said they would be back for him.
Mr. Herz, who had been hiding in the woods with several other men, returned about an hour later and was taken away by the Brown Shirts. It was his 51st birthday, Ms. Rosenstock said.
With Suse in tow, Mrs. Herz trudged around Worms looking for her husband, stopping at every government office that she knew of.
"I listened to her being abused by these people, being shouted at," she said.
Mr. Herz had been taken to the city jail with the other Jewish men from Worms and then shipped to Buchenwald. He returned to his family two-and-one-half months later, but was returned to the camps in 1942, where he ultimately died.
"They were starved, they were mistreated, they were left in the same clothing they had on when they got in there," she said of his first stay at the camps.
"When he got home we were waiting for him behind the big gate of our store my sister and I did not recognize this man that came through the door. He did not want to talk about what he had gone through. He felt it was too horrible to tell his children."
The Herz’s hardware store was a frequent target of local Nazis. Anti-Semitic graffiti was regularly painted across the storefront and sidewalk.
"Most nights the people, the Germans in town, the Nazis in town would paint on the front of our store in red paint, ‘Don’t buy here, they’re Jews,’ " she said. "My father would go out and scrub it down. You have to remember, in the 1930s you didn’t have acrylic paint so it wasn’t the easiest thing to take off, to take that stuff off cobblestones and sidewalks.
"And we were also so terribly afraid that they would come back around and see my father doing this and arrest him," she said. "But he insisted on doing it anyway."
Because of this, childhood was rough, she said.
"I wasn’t allowed to play with the neighbor’s daughter," she said. "The woman pulled her child in if I came to play with her.
"By the time I went to school, I was chased home and there were stones being thrown."
It was time to leave Germany, but getting out was difficult.
"There was a lady in the market where my mother bought her vegetables who used to warn my mother and say ‘Mrs. Herz, take your family and go somewhere,’ " Ms. Rosenstock said. "My mother would say ‘Where am I going to go?’ She wrote letters to America, she wrote to a cousin in South Africa. No one wanted to take the responsibility.
"It was a matter of writing an affidavit saying that if this family was indeed accepted for immigration to the U.S., they would not be a burden to the country and no one wanted to do that for her."
That’s when Ms. Rosenstock’s mother heard of the Kindertransport, which provided transportation and found homes in Great Britain for unaccompanied Jewish children. The program started in 1938 and lasted until Sept. 3, 1939 when war officially broke out between Germany and Great Britain.
"It was really a quirk of fate," she said. "My mother saw the little piece in the newspaper that said these transports were taking place and she ran to whatever office was mentioned in the newspaper and she registered me."
Ms. Rosenstock’s sister Edith was originally supposed to leave Germany to go to Cincinnati to stay with relatives, but "her name was never called." Because of this, it was all that more urgent that Mrs. Herz save at least one of her children.
"We knew what was happening," she said. "We knew things were getting worse for the Jews. The Crystal Night and the consequential shipping of my father to Buchenwald for two-and-a-half months was evidence enough."
Even so, her father could not at first accept what was happening. After returning from the camps, her father "kept saying, ‘Look, I have the Iron Cross (the German Medal of Honor), they’re not going to do anything to me,’ " Ms. Rosenstock said.
Her mother, however, was adamant and on July 25, 1939, 8-year-old Suse Herz was placed on a transport train in Mainz, near Worms. The train took her to the ship that brought her to England.
"My sister tells me that my father turned to her at that point and said ‘I’ll never see her again,’ " Ms. Rosenstock said.
Ms. Rosenstock spent much of the war shuttling between Coventry and the North England countryside to avoid German bombers. She lived with a Christian family.
"I felt like an orphan," she said. "It was culture shock as far as the food and the clothing were concerned. And religion, they didn’t try to convert me, but I had to live in their house as a member of their household."
She was unable to register for school at first, because she had to learn English, which she did by reading books and newspapers "with a German-English dictionary by my side. I read anything I could get my hands on."
She was in Coventry for the first major bomber raid.
"We were lucky, though, we only bad some incendiary bombs dropped in front of the house," she said. "But we were surrounded by bombings because we lived in an industrial area.
"It was frightening. We saw balloons, barrage balloons. We were strafed, had air raids. They flew low and machined-gunned us and we had to drop to the hedges. And there was always the threat of mustard gas."
The Heresies had moved from Worms to Duisberg shortly before young Suse left for England, a move that may have saved her mother and her sister, Ms. Rosenstock said.
"No one in the town of Worms who was deported to the concentration camps ever survived," she said.
In 1942, her father, her mother and her sister were deported to Terezin in what was then Czechoslovakia, a place Ms. Rosenstock calls "the Ritz of concentration camps."
"It was not an exterminating camp," she said. "Yes, they put people to work, and there was starvation, of course and there was deprivation anyway in these places, but the conditions there were better than at the rest."
Her father died there in October of that year, and her mother and sister were there until 1944 when they were deported to Auschwitz and then to Schtuthoff in Dansik (now Gdansk), Poland.
At one point while in Auschwitz, her mother and sister were herded into the gas chambers, but were spared.
"No gas came through the shower heads and they were told to go out, back to the barracks," she said. "Strangely enough, they were never selected for the gas chambers again."
The pair managed to stay together throughout the war, a fact that contributed to their survival. One time, Edith convinced the Germans that her mother was strong enough to work even though she did not make the cut-off date for work and was slated for extermination, Ms. Rosenstock said. Another time, when Edith was sick in the "so-called infirmary with what they thought was diphtheria and my mother came and pulled her out one night because she had heard they were going to liquidate the so-called infirmary."
Their ordeal came to an end in January 1945, when the German soldiers who were transporting them to the east fled as the Soviet Army was advancing. The soldiers left about 50 women and children behind in a barn.
"My sister had remembered my address throughout all that time in her head and she wrote it down for (one of the soldiers) and he in turn got this telegram out," she said.
On Feb. 11, 1947, two years after being liberated from the camps and nearly eight years after being separated, the surviving members of the family were reunited in New York. Ms. Rosenstock had arrived just a few weeks before her mother and sister, having been sponsored by her aunt, who also sponsored Mrs. Herz and Edith.
Ms. Rosenstock was at the harbor waiting for the ship.
"I was told they’d be landing at 10 a.m., however, the boat wasn’t going to land until at least noon," she said. "When it finally landed and I took I a good look at that ship I couldn’t imagine how anybody could have even survived the journey on it. The hold, the top, everything was just ripped apart on that ship.
"It was a terribly cold day, terribly long day, and at about 6 p.m. there was an announcement that certain people would not be coming off the boat because their papers were not in order.
"At that point I was scared. I thought this was surely going to be my mother and sister," she said. "There was a newsreel guy there and I was right there standing in the front of the line. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked me. ‘Because I’m afraid my mother and my sister might not come off the boat and I haven’t seen them in seven-and-a-half years.’ That stupid crying face I saw in the newsreel about two weeks later."
About an hour after that, Ms. Rosenstock said, her name was called over the loudspeaker and though she was scared she decided to answer the page. There she met a stevedore who had a picture of her who told her that her mother and sister would be off the boat within an hour.
She finally saw her mother, sitting on the pier holding her picture.
"This barrier I was standing next to was (almost waist-high) believe me I’m not athletic and never was but I jumped over this thing. I have no idea how I jumped over it."