Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht is recalled through the fate of the synagogue on Freiheit Street in Köpenick, a place the American athletes passed during the 1936 Olympics without knowing what lay ahead. The book sets the synagogue’s destruction against the ordinary life around it and, years later, returns to the site as an empty lot—a small, specific absence carrying the weight of a violence the visitors could not yet imagine.

Setting and Forewarning

In 1936, the synagogue was still part of the neighborhood’s life. The Hirschhahn family, Jewish members of its congregation, ran a clothing shop nearby. Richard and Hedwig worked at sewing machines in the back while their daughters, Eva and Ruth, served customers in front. Richard, who had been wounded fighting for Germany in the Great War, believed his service would protect his family; Hedwig had recently returned from Wisconsin, and the family had begun considering a move there. American friends were staying with them in Köpenick during the Olympics.

The athletes could walk past the synagogue and see the town as it appeared during their visit, but could not see the persecution to come. The narration places that ordinary scene beside later violence, emphasizing the gap between what the visitors encountered and what was already gathering around the people who lived there.

The Synagogue’s Destruction

On the night of November 9, 1938, a mob carrying torches would loot the synagogue on Freiheit Street and burn it to the ground. The book gives this destruction as one of the events that the boys could not have witnessed or anticipated during their stay in Köpenick. The future tense makes the account a stark reversal of the Olympic visit: a building they might have passed as part of a living community would become a site of destruction.

The synagogue’s fate belongs to a wider account of danger surrounding the Hirschhahns, though the book does not present its destruction as the cause of the family’s later persecution. Ruth would be taken first because asthma left her too weak to work; Richard and Hedwig would eventually be deported to Auschwitz, while Eva would escape into Berlin and survive the war. The family’s story gives the synagogue’s destruction a human and local context without making the events interchangeable.

The Site in Retrospect

In August 2011, the narrator returned to Köpenick and walked past the vacant lot on Freiheit Street where the synagogue had stood. The visit links the Olympic-era town to the later history of its Jewish residents: the building is gone, but the place remains legible as an absence. The narrator recalls the Hirschhahn family while standing there, bringing the book’s earlier account of unseen danger into the landscape of the present-day visit.

Kristallnacht thus marks a limit in what the athletes could know, not a danger they recognized and chose to ignore. By setting their 1936 passage beside the synagogue’s destruction ten days short of two years later, and then returning to its site in 2011, the narrative makes historical hindsight part of the event’s meaning: the Olympic setting could look intact while a community’s future was already under threat.