SIXTY YEARS AGO this week, as the fires of Kristallnacht scorched the skies over Germany, Leo Bretholz was a 17-year-old boy packed with six other desperate people into a rickety Peugeot racing across Europe to escape the destiny awaiting millions of Jews.
It was the overture to a miraculous seven-year journey for Bretholz, which started only days earlier, in Vienna, when his mother insisted that he run for his life. Roundups had long since begun. The rule of the mob had commenced.
Leaving behind his mother and his two young sisters, none of whom could have made such an escape, and none of whom would survive the war, Bretholz had already swum a torrential River Sauer, fully clothed on a chilled autumn night, and made his way into Luxembourg, where he was arrested but found haven and a second chance at escape with an underground organization known as the Ezra Committee.
On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, he sat in this little Peugeot heading for the temporary safety of Belgium, along with a driver named Becker, a plump woman with clacking dentures, a terrified teen-age girl, a man in eyeglasses and two other women, and headed through the Ardennes Forest, nearing the Bastogne region, never imagining the bloody fighting to come to that land six years later - and never conceiving of a place called Baltimore, where he would arrive after surviving the war years.
After a while on that long-ago night, the Ardennes vanished and the land seemed to open up. The sky was starry. Bretholz remembers staring straight ahead when the man with the eyeglasses, sitting behind him, cried in startled Yiddish, "Look, look to the right. Can you see what I'm seeing?"
The driver Becker slowed his car and then stopped it. It was long past midnight, and the road was deserted. In the farthest distance to the east, they could see odd flashes of color against a dark horizon, as though the sky were being smudged by some invisible giant hand.
It was the unleashing of Adolf Hitler's long night of barbarism, a moment that had merely been waiting for an excuse to happen.
Days earlier, the Gestapo rounded up 18,000 Polish Jews living in Germany and took them by special train to the Polish border. But they were denied entrance into Poland. Some were forced across the border illegally by the Nazis. About 5,000 were forced to a primitive camp in a tiny Polish frontier village, Zbazsyn.
Among them was a man named Grynszpan, who managed to get word to his son, a 17-year old student named Herschel who was living in Paris and was so enraged at the news that he went to the German Embassy there, intending to kill the ambassador. Instead, he shot a third secretary of the embassy, Ernst vom Rath.
'Action against Jews'
It was Nov. 7. Vom Rath would die two days later, his death mourned at a hero's burial service attended by Hitler that same evening. At 11:55 that night, a message was issued from Gestapo headquarters in Berlin to all officers:
"At very short notice, action against Jews, especially at their synagogues, will take place throughout the whole of Germany. I Preparations are to be made for the arrest of about twenty to thirty thousand Jews in the Reich."
As the little Peugeot paused on the road to Belgium, what its passengers saw reflected was the horrific response to that message: the fiery destruction of hundreds of synagogues, of thousands of stores and businesses, and the parading of thousands of beaten Jews before howling mobs.
The Germans called it retaliation for the killing of vom Rath. But it was also the night they implicitly set a policy for the Jews, and for the whole world: You kill one of ours, we kill many of yours. Don't even try to strike back.
In Brussels the next morning, Leo Bretholz learned of the night's destruction and tried to understand its dimensions. It was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, who placed the word "Kristallnacht" into the world's vocabulary. Goebbels meant it as a boast, a description of the glitter and the festive mood caused by billions of pieces of shattered glass from ruined synagogues burning through the night.
The 17-year-old Bretholz's thoughts went directly to his family. His mother and his two sisters were in Austria, which had been taken over by Germany eight months earlier. Had they been paraded through the streets? Had his own synagogue been one of the hundreds turned to rubble?
It would take the rest of the war to learn the depressing answers to these questions, a war Bretholz survived through a series of remarkable escapes from the Germans, and from those Vichy French who served as German lackeys - escapes aided not only by other Jews but by Franciscan monks, parish priests and a nun named Sister Joan of Arc.
Now 77 and retired from a career managing bookstores in the Baltimore area, Bretholz has spent the last half-century asking himself another, eternal question:Why me?
Why did he survive to come to America after the war when so many in his family did not?
He's part of a generation of Jews, many of whom will attend special synagogue services this week marking the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, who will ask the same question and know there is no conceivable answer.
But, in Bretholz's case, all these years later, he says it wasn't courage that kept him alive, but fear. He outran his worst terrors. He crawled beneath barbed wire at one holding camp, and crossed the Alps into allegedly neutral Switzerland on feet so frozen and bloody that his socks couldn't be separated from his skin.
Today, the world looks at Switzerland's banks and sees a nation that cashed in on people's desperation. Bretholz's contact was more emotional. Having made it across the Alps, he and a friend were confronted by a Swiss policeman named Arretaz, who looked at their false identity papers and snapped, "You have no right to be in Switzerland."
The simple right to stay alive meant nothing.
"I was born in Vienna," Bretholz quickly replied, trying to hold back a sob. "I ran away from the Nazis. I left my mother and my sisters in Vienna."
"False papers," Arretaz snapped again.
Bretholz reached for Arretaz' hand and asked for permission to see a judge. Arretaz sneered. Bretholz begged to be placed in a Swiss internment camp. Instead, he was sent back to Vichy France, to one holding camp and then another.
The last was called Drancy, which was the final stop before Auschwitz, the concentration camp that was the end of the world.
Like many who survived not only World War II but, specifically, the German war against the Jews, Bretholz kept most of his memories to himself for a long time.
Eighteen months ago, he asked me to collaborate with him on a book, which has just been published by Woodholme House, called "Leap Into Darkness - Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe."
On the day we first sat down to talk, he handed me another book, published 20 years ago in France, called "Le Memorial de la Deportation Des Juifs de France." It's the size of a telephone directory. It's the compilation of every wartime transport that left the holding camp at Drancy for the concentration camp at Auschwitz - all names, dates of birth, places of birth, and the fate of each person.
Tally of death
There was Leo Bretholz's name, along with 999 other Jews herded into freight cars, 50 per car, that left for Auschwitz on the raw morning of Nov. 6, 1942. Of the 1,000 who left Drancy that day, 773 were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz or died en route. Another 145 men and 82 women were selected for forced labor, of whom four men survived. These are the Germans' own numbers.
But there is at least one mistake in their record-keeping: Bretholz is listed as one of the dead.
Instead, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a blackened French countryside, he and another young fellow squeezed through the iron bars of a small window as the train slowed for a curve, and jumped for their lives.
They were lucky - inexplicably so. How did they survive when so many did not? No one can ever fully know. There were millions like Leo Bretholz all across Europe, pursued merely for the crime of being Jewish.
Sixty years ago this week, in the fires of Kristallnacht, an entire generation began to learn what such a crime meant.
Michael Olesker is a columnist for The Sun.
Pub Date: 11/08/98