Eve Kugler

Yesterday I had the absolute privilege of co-hosting a Holocaust Memorial Day event at uni where we were blessed to hear from Holocaust survivor, Eve Kugler. Her story is inspiring and her excellent responses to the Q&A were truly thought provoking. She’s the third survivor I’ve had the privilege of speaking with personally in my time as a Holocaust Education Ambassador, and every time it really brings home just how recent the Holocaust actually was. And always, I am moved by their bravery, their compassion, and their enlightenment about the world. Eve’s story is remarkable and her book Shattered Crystals is available for free online here. However, I wanted to share her story in her own words, so that as many people as possible can benefit from hearing her first-hand. As Eve said yesterday, education is the most powerful weapon in our armoury against fascism and hatred ✨ 

“In New York in five years I lived in three different foster homes. I did not believe that I would ever see my parents again. Our family was reunited in New York in 1946. We started again with nothing except the Jewish beliefs and values that the Nazis could never take from us.

 

My memories of Halle are… very small, and very fleeting. I remember going with my grandfather to a farm in order to get milk, because he was very, very observant of kashrut and the milk that you would buy locally was not suitable. I remember going with him when I was about four. I remember when my mother’s younger sister got married in Leipzig because I must have been about three. I was a flower girl... I think, looking back on what happened, what must have stayed in the back of my mind was the Nazis everywhere…which I think greatly, hugely, hugely frightened me. Because, oh, and I do remember also going on a picnic by the river and lying in the grass looking at the trees with the sky. All beautiful, as you can see, happy, sylvan memories. And then I remember leaving Germany, in 1939. We flew out. And I remember looking down from the plane at the rows of the houses below. And that, on one hand, are basically my memories of Germany. 

 

I lived through the nightmare that was Kristallnacht when I was seven years old. That our family was still in Nazi Germany almost six years after Hitler came to power was not through choice. Although he had served in the German army in World War 1, my father was not one of those German-born Jews who thought nothing would happen to us. He was the owner of a small department store in the city of Halle an der Saale, famous as the birthplace of the composer Georg Friedrich Handel and the birthplace of the infamous Reinhard Heydrich, the despised architect of the programme to exterminate the Jews. My father felt the danger of the Nazis, as posters shouting ‘Juden Verboten’ appeared in store windows, cinemas and public parks all over our city, books by Jewish writers were publicly burned and his customers abandoned him.

He was wrong in believing that I and my sister Ruth, a year older, were unaware of the tension in our home as Nazi antisemitism steadily increased and friends who were opponents of Hitler were arrested. He thought of us as little dolls, oblivious to the fear uniformed Nazis created as they paraded down our streets requiring all to salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ when they passed. He shrugged off as Nazi stupidity the time an SS man scooped me up – a fair, blue eyed girl – and congratulated my terrified mother on having such a beautiful Aryan child.”

 

Father was right though in recognising the dangers for Jews in Germany. In 1934 he applied for a visa to Palestine. But as a businessman he had low priority and four years later we were still waiting. Though our name reached the top of the list of people entitled to the visa, we were continually bypassed in favour of Jews in imminent danger of arrest. On 29 October 1938, the Nazis arrested all Polish Jews living in Germany and sent them back to Poland. It was the first mass deportation of Jews and included my beloved grandfather, who had lived with us, as well as more than a dozen others of our family. 

 

Ten days later six uniformed Nazis came for my father. I stood at my bedroom door and watched as they stormed through our apartment. They overturned furniture, emptied linen, clothes and kitchen cupboards, trampling on the contents. In a frenzied attack in grandfather’s room, they tore apart his sacred Hebrew texts and desecrated his holy Sefer Torah. In the morning Nazis ordered mother to sweep up shards of glass from our shattered store windows that littered the pavement. During the Nazi rampage that was Kristallnacht they torched the synagogue that grandfather had established decades ago, while firemen watched until nothing was left of the temple where I had begun cheder (Hebrew school).

 

In the afternoon mother walked to our local police station and was told that my father was in Buchenwald. If she could produce a visa, they said, he would be freed. Germany was to become Judenrein, free of Jews. It took her six weeks. The week my father left for France with his forged visa, we were evicted from our flat. The Nazis had created an arbitrary list of homes in which Jews were permitted to reside, forcing Jews to share living quarters. Ours was not on the list. Mother sent Ruth, my 2-year-old sister Lea and me to Leipzig to live with her father, although he was already sharing his flat with five other Jewish families. It took her another six months to procure a second illegal visa. We flew to Paris at the end of June 1939 with one suitcase each and a total of 40 Deutschmarks, all the Nazis permitted us to take out of the country.” 

 

“The reunion of our family was short-lived. When war broke out in September of 1939, the French interned my father as a German national. Now destitute, mother sent my sisters and me to a home for displaced Jewish children run by the Jewish welfare organisation, OSE. My most abiding memory of the year in the home was the continuous bombing in the weeks before the Nazis took Paris. Just before the city fell, the children were hastily evacuated to other OSE homes in central France. Now living under the collaborationist Vichy government, our future was uncertain. The present consisted of severe shortages of food and fuel.

 

The children were always hungry; in the winter we shivered in unheated quarters. In 1941 the United States issued a rare visa for several hundred Jewish children trapped in French concentration camps. When the French Resistance could not spirit the children out of the camps, the visa was given to the OSE. At the last minute Ruth and I took the place of two children who had suddenly become ill and were forbidden to travel. I remember nothing of the long, hazardous train journey through France and Spain, nor of sailing across the U-boat infested Atlantic Ocean. In New York in five years I lived in three different foster homes. I did not believe that I would ever see my parents again. I don’t know when I realised that I could remember nothing of the years in Nazi Germany, except flying out of the country. Nor could I recall much of my two years in France. But the guilt I felt for securing a place of safety at the expense of a sick child never left me.

My parents and Lea did survive. With the help of the French Resistance Lea was hidden first in a Catholic convent and then on an isolated farm. My mother and father survived three French concentration camps, twice miraculously spared from deportation to Auschwitz. My father struggled as a forced labourer on the Nazi project to strengthen the seawall in Calais where they expected the Allied invasion to take place, until he managed an almost unheard of escape from this camp. Our family was reunited in New York in 1946. We started again with nothing except the Jewish beliefs and values that the Nazis could never take from us. But it was a very difficult adjustment [when her parents arrived in NYC after five years of separation] for me because initially I’d forgotten all my - my German. Most of us did. We made a wilful effort. We didn’t want to have anything to do with German, we didn’t want to admit we were German, so we remembered nothing. And so I had to re-learn my German. My mother’s English was sparse. But she was a linguist; they learnt French very quickly, they learnt English. So there was a language barrier, but the greater barrier was the fact that my mother felt that she wanted to pick up where we left off. 

I worked, earned a university degree and became a journalist. I went around for years and years plagued by the fact that I really had very little memory of anything that happened to me before I stepped off the ship, when I was not quite eleven, and landed in New York and walked down this wooden pier. And that used to be my memory of when my life really started. And this plagued me. It really drove me crazy. And I was I think in my forties, when I finally, and I will say ‘got the nerve’, because I thought about this for a long time. And I asked my mother to tell me what happened. What happened to me, to my sisters? What was my life like? Tell me everything.

And my mother, who was in 1997 she was 93 years old. That was when the book was published. And she used to say, “How’s it going? How is the book doing?” Now, she wasn’t looking for being famous. She wanted everybody to know. She said, “Everybody has to know what happened during the war. What happened to us. People have to learn.” And so I- it sounds grandiose, but I feel now along with other survivors I have a duty to my parents, and to the survivor community, to share this story. I think it’s…it’s a way of people having to learn. And I find that no matter what programs there are, the reaction to someone who tells a story and says, “I was there and this is what happened to me” always has the most – most immediacy, the most influence.

[I stress the importance of] learning what happened to - to the Jewish people, how, how terrible it was, and you know, how six million people, including over a million children, perished. That this is something which should not be repeated. And if you understand it and take in what happened, hopefully, that you will do what you can in whatever small way even if it’s just speaking to other people, and telling them about what you’ve seen, and telling them, sharing even just this experience to try and make people see that they should... stop killing each other. But for years I was plagued by my inability to remember what had happened to me during the first 11 years of my life. In my forties, I finally asked my mother to tell me all that had taken place. The story of our family’s survival is recounted in my book, Shattered Crystals. I now speak in schools, synagogues and to civic groups about this history and accompany young people to Poland on the annual March of the Living.”