`Those were terrible times’ : 99-year-old recalls Kristallnacht

Fifty-nine years ago Monday, a blood-splattered Hilde Meyer stumbled through the streets of Castrop Rauxel, Germany. Crushed glass crunched under her shoes; fires smoldered in nearby shops and apartment buildings and residents wandered bewildered through the detritus of the small town.

It was Nov. 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, an event now known as "the night of broken glass." Throughout Germany and Austria that night, Nazi mobs ransacked and burned synagogues and Jewish businesses. Jews were assaulted, arrested, even killed.

Meyer -- now a spry 99-year-old living in Oakland and one of a dwindling number of surviving witnesses to Kristallnacht -- can still evoke the harrowing evening in an instant.

The first officially sanctioned pogrom of the Third Reich, it left her father and brother bruised, battered and missing teeth. It left her family's variety store, Weinberg's, where Meyer worked as a sales clerk, a shell of what it had been.

"My coat was so full of blood it couldn't ever be cleaned," she says, remnants of a German accent still evident in her voice. "Those were terrible times."

A bright, engaging woman with smooth white hair and a simple string of pearls, she widens her eyes as she tells stories of her life. In her two-room apartment at the Altenheim, a senior housing facility near Fruitvale Avenue, Meyer recalls how she managed to escape the worst.

Some weeks after Kristallnacht, which marked a sharp and foreboding turn for German and Austrian Jews, she fled to Holland with the help of the Dutch underground.

One cold December morning, she got the go-ahead call from an underground contact in Dusseldorf. That same night, careful not to reveal her plans for fear of being caught, she packed a tiny bag and slipped away as stealthily as fog.

After slogging through swamps to cross northern Germany to the Dutch border, she and her fellow escapees shivered in fear as they faced the last leg of their journey.

"We had to lie down on the ground in the night, flat on our stomachs," she recalls. "It was icy cold."

As instructed, they lay perfectly still until they saw a light from a house on the Dutch side. The light, they had been told, was their sign to rise and walk closer toward the border. There, a young man approached Meyer, gave her a pair of wooden clogs and locked his arm through hers as casually as if he had known her forever.

"We walked as if we had come from a dance," she says.

In Amsterdam, Meyer lodged with a cousin and busied herself with odd jobs. But several months later, in March 1939, a voice inside her head told her to leave the country.

"I had a bad feeling. I thought we were in a dangerous situation," she says. "It saved my life, that bad feeling."

So she fled once again, this time to England, where she worked first as a maid and later, sewing buttons on military uniforms. The labor tired her, as did moving from town to town to find work while avoiding German bombs, which tended to target larger cities.

"It was safer to stay in small places," she says. "Small places were not bombed."

The screaming of the bombs provided a symbolic echo of what was happening to Meyer's loved ones half a continent away. While she was living in England, her parents, husband, brother and other relatives were marching to their deaths.

An older sister survived by escaping to Shanghai with her husband. Life there "was very hard," Meyer says. "They were thin as a bone." Meyer's sister later settled in Oakland; in 1948, Meyer joined her.

For years, she worked for the Blue Cross insurance company.

"It kept me going, out of trouble," she says. At age 62, years of displacement and work caught up with her and she retired. Currently, she receives a pension from Germany.

She spent a chunk of her retirement years living in Oakland's Park Boulevard neighborhood. She moved into the Altenheim in 1989.

In her quiet apartment overlooking a garden lined with tall, leafy trees, Meyer spends much of her time reading. She diligently reads newspapers, following the stock market.

"The ups and downs don't bother me," she says of the Dow's steep slide last week.

She also keeps up on her German with Aufbau, America's only German-Jewish publication.

She devours books by the satchelful; last week she was turning the last pages of "Calling Dr. Kildare," a romance novel. "I'm very slow now but reading I do very quickly," she says with a smile.

Sometimes she watches TV and particularly enjoys trying to outguess contestants on "Wheel of Fortune." Sometimes she sits quietly, reflecting on all she has seen during the past near-century.

The photos that decorate her walls, refrigerator, mirror and nightstand speak to a well-lived life. There are pictures of friends, many of them from Blue Cross, and relatives in the Bay Area and South Africa.

In one photo, Meyer smiles from the inside barrel of a hot air balloon. "I was the oldest one to fly in the balloon," she says proudly. "I got a prize."

And then there are glimpses of life before America -- a photo of the building on the town square that once housed the family store. Another shows Castrop Rauxel in winter, snow-covered and peaceful.

That's how Meyer likes to remember it.