Memories my mother told me about my childhood during our last days in our old country.
Two brothers about 6 and 9 years old, with obvious Teutonic looks – blond hair and blue eyes – stood one day in the early months of 1933 at the corner of a main street in Berlin, when with a deafening sound of drums and trumpets a large group of Brown Shirts approached, marching and holding huge flags with swastikas blowing in the wind.
The younger of the two children pulled towards the parade while the older one tried to get away. A policeman standing nearby smiled at the children, lifted the younger one upon his shoulders, and holding the hand of the older one, made his way towards the enthusiastic crowd cheering on the sidewalk. Trying to make room for himself and the two boys, he said aloud with a voice full of pride: „Please make room for these children, Germany‘s future! …“ The two „Aryan“ children were my big brother Manfred and myself, Herbert, two … Jewish children.
A few months later, we were already on our way to Palestine with our parents, leaving behind in Europe most of our family, never to see them again …
On the train to Paris, where we first went, near the French border, a German woman wearing a swastika badge on the collar of her shirt addressed my mother with a big friendly smile, looking admiringly at us children, and said that she must be very proud of her handsome pure Aryan boys … My mother, feeling probably the approaching winds of freedom from the new Nazi regime, answered that she was indeed very proud of her two pure Jewish sons. The woman with the swastika badge seemed quite embarrassed, but at the next stop, the last one on German soil, she hurried out and returned holding two parcels of sweets, which she offered with an apologizing smile to the two Jewish children, who looked so much like pure German Aryans …