Business Black Box

Yet a life lived in the ghetto was tolerable, at least in
comparison with what was about to happen.
In early November 1938, in response to the shooting of a
German embassy official stationed in Paris, Hitler’s propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels announced “the Fuhrer has decided
that…demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by
the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not
to be hampered.”
In essence, he declared an “open season” against the
Jewish people.
Nights of Brokenness
In response to Goebbels’ directives, Reinhard Heydrich,
the head of the Security Police, delivered orders as to how
the pogroms (violent massacres or persecutions of an ethnic
or religious group) should be carried out, not least of which
was that officials should arrest as many Jews as the jails could
hold—especially young, healthy men.
The Schonthals had not heard about these active pursuits
when Trude’s father, Schimek, left the house on the morning
of November 9, just before a friend of Trude’s called the house.
“Don’t let your father leave,” she said. It wasn’t long before her
father returned, though, having convinced officers to let him
return home to say goodbye before boarding a train—one likely
headed to a concentration camp.
“‘I’m lost,’ he said,” Trude remembers. But the family
was not yet ready to give him up. A neighbor hid him in a
closet until they were able to get a taxi, where the driver
hid him on the floor as they transported the family to their
last open store. They would hide for almost two days there,
while German soldiers and citizens destroyed everything
Jewish in what would be come known as Kristallnacht—
“The Night of Broken Glass.”
“We had an iron curtain on the store, and we closed it,”
she says. “And we stayed there for 36 hours.”
Soldiers knocked on the door, and the family remained
quiet. But when they sealed the lock with a swastika sticker,
it was up to Trude to get the family out after the program
had eased.
“To destroy a swastika is death,” she remembers. “It was
up to me to take the big key and open the lock without
disturbing the sticker. So I did.”
The family returned to their home, knowing that now,
for good, everything had changed. So when her father got
an invitation to go to the Gestapo (“Nobody ever came back
from that,” she says), he decided that it was time to leave.
He boarded a train destined for Rotterdam, bribed a waiter
to hide him, and eventually made it to Antwerp, Belgium,
where they could get temporary, 30-day visas.
Back in Vienna, Trude and her mother, Rose, were facing
their own demons. Trude, being a blonde, blue-eyed beauty,
struggled against offenses by German predators, all while
helping Rose maintain her sanity.
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