The Jewish Observer

During the school year of 1937/38, Charlotte Romberg attended kindergarten. December 6 was Santa Clause day: a celebration of the coming of Santa Clause. A man dressed in a Santa suit would come along with another man, a kind of bishop figure with a tall pointed hat. After witnessing Kristalnacht, her dreams transformed these figures into short SA Nazi brown shirts carrying sledge hammers. But they also wore some of the Santa gear as well. In her dreams she referred to them as the “small men,” and their appearance was always a sign of danger. Kristalnacht conflated the appearance of Santa Clause with Nazi atrocity. The dream followed Charlotte through much of her life. Her interview with me was the first time she ever spoke about it to anyone.

On the morning of November 10, 1938, Charlotte woke up to a house without parents. She did not know it yet, but her mother had left to escort her father to work, to make sure he arrived safely. The night had already contained most of the destruction – but not all. She went down to the street. There she saw a band of Nazis, some in uniform, some in plain clothes, carrying sledge hammers and other tools of destruction. They began to smash down the doors of a Jewish shop across from their building. They smashed the windows and emptied the contents of the store into the street. Charlotte ran upstairs, frightened.

Later, after her mother arrived home, she went out and saw that the shop next door, a Jewish owned shop of threads and laces, was destroyed. A Torah scroll from a small Jewish prayer space on an upper floor of a building across the street, was tossed out of the window onto the ground. Her mother tried to help one of the Jewish neighbors put their store back together.

Margaret, Charlotte’s mother, was Catholic. So she was able to provide some protection from Nazi brutality, but not much. Charlotte was not allowed to attend certain schools because her father was a Jew. Their living quarters were limited to certain areas, certain buildings and as the war began, the conditions grew progressively worse. Watching the deportation of her Jewish girlfriends from downstairs, Elfreide and Helga, stays with her and she still tears up when she speaks of a fountain in Cologne dedicated to the city’s Jewish children killed by the Nazis. Her friends’ names are on the fountain.

But there was worse. As a technically “Jewish” family, when allied bombs fell they were not allowed to use the bomb cellars with other families. One time, however, she, her mother and siblings were caught outside with their father, just outside their building. They grabbed their father’s hands and pulled him inside the cellar of the building as the allied bombs began to fall. Inside the space, which is barely large enough to hold two families, was a Nazi family they knew from the neighborhood. As this family glared at the Rombergs Charlotte remembers glaring back, clenching her fists, daring them to say something out loud.

Almost a year after her father died, in July of 1943, one of the largest Allied bombing raids on Cologne occurred, resulting in their apartment building being destroyed – along with many of their family documents and picture. As a result, Charlotte has no pictures of her father. But there was an advantage to the destruction by the bombing – government offices were also destroyed, so there was no longer documentation of the family’s Jewishness. Her mother told the children not to mention to anyone that their late father was a Jew. Yet, Charlotte remembers clearly, that as they moved from stage to stage, Margaret never let them forget that they were indeed the children of Walter Romberg – a Jew in blood if not in faith.

The destruction of that night was so bad, that the family, along with many others, was evacuated to Silesia. Charlotte and her siblings went to school there, able to conceal a piece of their identity, yet never forgetting.

In 1945, as the Russian front drew ever closer, they were evacuated to the Sudetenland. There, Charlotte had a group of girl friends who formed their own imaginary “Hitler Youth” club. This was not something official. The children had been brainwashed to believe that Hitler was a person who was kind and gentle with children. After all, the propaganda they saw showed the Fuhrer holding little children and smiling at them. Charlotte had not yet experienced the cognitive dissonance between the Hitler of fiction and the one responsible for the death of her father, as well as her family’s flight from their home in Cologne.

The other little girls in her group wanted her to be a leader of their Hitler fan club. When Charlotte told this to her mother, Margaret had only one question for her daughter, “Do you remember where you came from?” On they day they learned that that Hitler was dead and the war was over, ironically, Charlotte cried tears of grief. The victim had formed a psychological connection to her oppressor.