A doll called Inge that survived the looting during Kristallnacht in November 1938 was recently handed over to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem by its owner and is now on display there.
Lore Mayerfield Stern, a Holocaust survivor from Kassel, Germany, was just 2 years old when the anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," caused massive destruction to Jewish property in her city and across Nazi Germany and Austria. During the pogrom, which took place on Nov. 9-10, 1938, at least 90 Jews were killed, 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, almost 300 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed.
Inge, along with personal letters Stern had kept from that era, is now part of Yad Vashem's It Came From Within online exhibition, which marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
During Kristallnacht, Stern's father, Markus Stern, was one of the Jewish men arrested and was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Young Lore and her mother, Kaetchen, were taken in and hidden by neighbors, who kept them safe during the riots.
"Lore, already in pajamas, hid with her mother at the neighbors' house until the pogrom was over. When they returned home, they found that the place had been torn apart and was not habitable," Yad Vashem states on its website.
The mother and daughter then moved to the home of Kaetchen's mother, Lena Kahnlein-Stern.
Meanwhile, Markus Stern was released after six weeks because he had a U.S. visa, and was told he had to leave Germany immediately. He left for the United States, and after 18 months, he managed to get visas for his wife and daughter.
"They sailed from Portugal on the Mouzinho in August 1941," Yad Vashem says. "Lore took Inge, the doll she had received for her birthday from her grandmother Lena, with her on her voyage. She dressed Inge in the pajamas that she had worn the night of Kristallnacht, pajamas she had since grown out of. On Sept. 9, the ship docked in New York, and Markus was reunited with his family. ... Markus and Kaetchen only discovered what had befallen those family members who had remained behind in Germany after the war."
They learned that Markus' parents, Jettchen and Daniel Stern, and his only sister, Sarah, had perished in the Holocaust, as had Kaetchen's mother Lena, her sisters Bella Simon and Selma Sender, and their families. Two more of Kaetchen's siblings, Moritz and Erma, managed to flee to the U.S. before the war.
Lore Stern made aliyah in 1991.
"The doll means a lot to me," she told Israel Hayom.
"My grandmother gave it to me and for years I refused to let my family play with it because it is so delicate. When Yad Vashem approached me, I decided that it was important that the doll and its story stay at the museum for posterity.
"It is the only thing that I have from that era, and the fact that it traveled with me from Germany on a boat to the U.S. and has been next to me all my life, in my youth, and in my adulthood and after I got married, carries so much symbolism," she said.
According to Yad Vashem Project Coordinator Yona Kobo, the exhibition focuses on the personal perspectives and fates of the Jews in Germany and Austria who experienced Kristallnacht first-hand.
"We considered it important to reveal the faces behind the human stories of that night. It is a story that the raw numbers don't fully tell, a story that often gets lost in all the numbers," Kobo said.
