Ruth Jackson, age 12, Berlin, November 8, 1938:

"For the Nazis, you didn’t have to do anything wrong, you just had to be Jewish. On the day before Kristallnacht, the Nazi Youth went round & painted a big white ‘J’ or wrote the word ‘Jude’ meaning ‘Jew’, on all the shop windows in Berlin, so that was an easier target for them. On the actual night I was woken—my parents told me to get dressed, & we all sat & waited, because we could hear all the noise down the roads, of lorries, people being—shouted, being pulled out of their homes.

There was a furrier opposite us & he had two small children. They were pulled out in their nightclothes & shoved onto the lorry. It was a very frightening experience. I was waiting for them to come into our house any moment now, but somehow we got missed out. It was a corner house & they went round the corner & they took a young family with a baby. I really couldn’t understand what they could have done wrong. So we sat there waiting & finally with a lot of shouting & banging, a lot of noise everywhere, glass flying, the Nazis left.

My mother made the usual cup of coffee & said, ‘Now we can go to bed’, but we really couldn’t go to sleep any more. The next morning she told me not to go to school, but I was fond of school so I went, only to find that my school had been ransacked. We had vines growing up the school & we enjoyed harvesting the grapes, but they had all been pulled down. The books were all smouldering from the fire in the foreground. The building was a new building so it was very much of a concrete block, they couldn’t do much there but the glass windows of course were broken, the furniture was broken or burnt. The Headmistress told us to go home again, very quietly, but in small groups, which we did.

After that, my parents thought it was best that I went to another school again, which I did. The new school was not far away from the KDW, if you know where that is, it’s a big store, on Joachimsthaler Strasse, it was called the Josef-Lehmann-Schule. So I went there, just for a short time, until I emigrated. After going to the new school I used to quite often walk to the school, take a bus in the morning, walk home again.

I quite liked walking down the Kurfürstendamm, especially at Christmastime, they used to have Christmas trees for sale all along the road, & they had booths along there, selling things, Christmassy things. Like any other child I enjoyed looking at those, but I couldn’t understand why all these people were all in such a happy mood. They didn’t seem to care about what was happening to us at all. And Hanukkah, that’s our feast of lights, was spent very quietly at home."