Retired educator Ruth Weiner knew her life was changing forever when she was just 7 years old in Vienna, Austria. She can recall that day in 1938 with a crystal clear memory.
Weiner was a young Jewish student who had a good friend named Kitty. Both attended public school. Kitty had fallen and broken her arm and one day needed help taking her jacket off.
“And she spits in my face. And I have to tell you, I mean, I can feel it,” the 93-year-old Weiner told a rapt, sold-out audience of over 400 people at the Wilton Library on Monday evening, Nov. 18. “I can feel it to this day. It’s funny how feelings do stay with you… From that day on, I understood that my life was not going to be the same.”
Weiner told her story as part of a Kristallnacht Commemoration held on Monday evening, presented by Farmington-based Voices of Hope, a provider of Holocaust education to the state’s students, teachers and communities.
Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, was a wave of violence against Jewish people carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces Nov. 9-10, 1938 in Germany and Austria.
Weiner, who at times got emotional during her talk, said there are some parallels from what she experienced to what she sees going on in the world today.
While she said she didn’t want to raise anxieties or get political, Weiner warned against people being disinterested in current events, or feeling like there is nothing they can do.
Weiner said Hitler’s rise to power in Germany was not something that happened suddenly. She advised the crowd to read up on that point in history.
“It’s a terribly dangerous process of how do you gain control over a country, over a government, over the mentality of a people, so that it’s possible for you to assume complete power. It’s an issue worth examining,” Weiner said. “And Hitler wrote the playbook. He wrote the playbook.”
Weiner’s Story
Weiner was born in 1931, an only child, in a city she described as beautiful and cultured with museums, parks, gardens, and palaces. But it was also still recovering from the First World War.
By 1938, shortly after the spitting incident with Weiner’s friend, Jewish children were all expelled from public schools and had to attend a Jewish school. Weiner had to take two streetcars and then walk the rest of the way to get there.
An event called ‘The Anschluss’ occurred in March 1938 when Austria was invaded by German troops and absorbed into the German Reich. Weiner called the event part of Hitler’s playbook.
Afterward, Austria’s streets became filled with members of the SS and SA as well as a group called “Hilter’s Youth,” made up of 16 and 17 year olds.
“If you wanted to survive, you became an adult,” Weiner recalled in learning how to avoid confrontations and survive her new reality.
Her father would be sent to jail, but at least was kept from being sent to the concentration camps thanks to the intervention of a lawyer friend that Weiner said wasn’t Jewish.
Then came Nov. 10, 1938. Weiner had gone to school that morning. She noticed there were many more uniformed individuals than usual on the streets. She saw huge piles of books were being set on fire.
“To me, a book was something that you washed your hands before you touched it. It was so special. And you took good care of it,” Weiner said. “And the notion that somebody was burning them was one of the most shocking experiences of my childhood. It truly was.”
Weiner finally made her way to the school where people were throwing cobblestones through the windows into the classroom where she huddled with her classmates. School was dismissed, and Weiner made her way home.
Her mother took Weiner to check on her grandparents. There, a group of Hitler’s Youth banged on the apartment door and demanded that everyone leave and join other Jewish people who were on the sixth floor. Weiner’s grandmother refused to leave, and eventually Weiner headed back to her own apartment with her mother.
What came next was a harrowing scene. Weiner recalled that two Gestapo officers came to her home and began knocking loudly on the door. Remaining silent, Weiner and her mother traded notes penciled on paper, listening as the officers’ footsteps went away, only for the knocking to start up again, and the cycle began again.
Weiner’s mother finally answered a phone that had been ringing all evening to find, the lawyer who helped her father on the other end. He instructed them to get ready to leave and he would help them get out of the building safely, which he did. The plan included the lawyer pinning swastikas on the coats of Weiner and her mother.
“And then came what had to be one of the bizarrest experiences of my life, which was that the three of us are walking like we’re going for a lovely little evening stroll down what was kind of the main street of the area where we lived,” Weiner said. “And there were fires still burning. There was glass all over the street. It was a terrible thing.”
Weiner and her mother spent the night at the lawyer’s family home.
A later trip back to Vienna in 2005 and finding her apartment revealed that the door the Gestapo had been banging on, behind which Weiner and her mother hid, was made of metal. All other doors in the building were made of wood, which the officers could break down and then remove the Jewish inhabitants to be sent to concentration camps.
“I really owe my life to the goodness of a human being and metal,” Weiner said.
Weiner’s grandmother would pass away of a heart attack before she could leave Vienna. Her grandfather would later be sent to his death.
In the summer of 1939, Weiner escaped to England. Her parents escaped just weeks before World War II broke out. The family came to the United States in 1940 and settled in Hartford.
Weiner’s husband, Myron Weiner is a retired UConn professor. Weiner is mother to Jonathan and Ethan Weiner and Adina Kennedy, and the grandmother of five and great-grandmother of five.
In her introduction of Weiner, Robin Landau, Voices of Hope’s Director of Programming, said the organization’s mission is to promote “a culture of courage to stand up against hatred through Holocaust and genocide education and remembrance.
Voices of Hope’s program HERO, or Holocaust Education Resource and Outreach Center, has reached over 26,000 students and educators in 88 schools throughout Connecticut, Landau said. This past year, Weiner has spoken to over 2,400 students in the Norwalk Public Schools, Landau said.
“While we are always careful in making comparisons to the Holocaust, this past year’s unprecedented growth of antisemitism and the powerful force of disinformation are trends that require us to sound an alarm and focus Holocaust and genocide education on the dangers of normalizing antisemitism and hatred and fighting propaganda,” Landau said. “Voices of Hope stands in a unique position to work with students, educators and community members to shine a light on these issues and to help them make a connection between historical and current events. I encourage you to utilize the tools we provide in your community.”
Weiner emphasized the same lesson of the importance of learning from the past.
What happened in Europe in the late 1930s, “happened day by day, week by week, year by year. We all have to be tuned in. We have to be on guard,” Weiner said, or we will end up repeating history.
The event at the Wilton Library was co-sponsored by the library, Temple B’nai Chaim, and Riverbrook Regional YMCA.
Kristallnact program was well organized and managed.
Ruth Weiner was a strikingly intelligent and wonderful
presenter for such a complex and personal story from her
life lived over so many years. I would recommend this event
to interested adults and (appropriate) school aged children.
Finally, I thank the Wilton Library for going above and beyond their initial plans to share Ruth Weiner’s life story with an increasingly large group of interested attendees. Thank you
to all of the employees and staff in the planning and support throughout the program.