We Had to Be Brave by Deborah Hopkinson

Author:Deborah Hopkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

A numbered identification tag worn by Henry Schmelzer when he was on a Kindertransport from Austria to England in December 1938.

Thea Feliks Eden didn’t board a train from her home or from a temporary stay in a Jewish orphanage. Instead, she escaped after long months in the Zbaszyn internment camp on the Polish border. Thea almost didn’t make it out: She was on one of the last transports before World War II erupted on September 1, 1939.

Thea hailed from Cologne, Germany; her father died when she was six, and her mother was originally from Poland. To Thea, who was born in 1926, it seemed as though the Nazis were “always there.” She grew up feeling threatened as she walked to school; she got used to seeing signs in store windows declaring that Jews weren’t welcome.

Once, when Thea was standing in front of her own house, a child threw a rock and hit her. Thea felt blood streaming down her face. The stone had missed her eye by a fraction of an inch. Thea soon learned not to speak to anyone, in a world that seemed, every day, ever more “dangerous, crazy, and evil.”

Thea’s mother had been born in Poland. In October 1938, the Polish government declared Thea’s mother’s passport invalid. Shortly before Kristallnacht, along with thousands of others, Thea’s family was rounded up and taken away.

“A day you get up—it’s like any other day. Suddenly there are Nazis at the door, and they tell you you’re leaving your home, right now. You pack your suitcase and you’ve got to be at the station at five o’clock, or else,” said Thea.

Thea and her family were part of the group of more than twelve thousand Jews of Polish descent expelled by Germany. With their Polish passports invalidated, they’d become stateless. The families were taken by train or in vans across the border, where the refugees were housed in abandoned buildings near the town of Zbaszyn, Poland.

As we’ve already seen, this event had wide repercussions. One family deported from Hanover was the Grynszpans, whose son, Herschel, was living in Paris. His subsequent killing of a German official was used by the Nazis as the rationale for Kristallnacht.

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