The Story of Liz – Beyond The Night of Broken Glass

Four-year-old Elizabeth and her family lived in an apartment above the butcher shop. Each morning, she made her way down the stairs, where the smiling neighbor in a fresh apron would carve off a piece of bologna and place it in her outstretched hand – until one day when she approached the counter with her small, expectant hand and saw that the butcher's smile was gone. His eyes, once kind, were cold and hard as he pointed to the door. Crying and confused, Elizabeth fled upstairs to her mother, who struggled to find a way to explain to her child why their family was no longer welcome in the only home Elizabeth had ever known. It was 1938. The post-WWI democratic republic of Germany had collapsed, and the country was in the grip of the totalitarian ideology of Nazism. Elizabeth's family would soon be forced to flee or stay and die. 

Elizabeth Lilien, known as Liz to her many friends in the North Fork, recently celebrated her birthday. It was a sweet celebration of a life well-lived for the sharp and savvy 90-year-old, and her friends and family in attendance were all too aware that it was a celebration that might have never been. I sat down with Liz in the cozy living room of her little yellow house outside Crawford and asked her to tell me the story of her escape from the Third Reich and how a young Jewish girl made her way from Hitler's Germany to the Western Slope of Colorado. 

Liz was born in 1934. She lived with her sister, her parents, and her grandmother in Straubing, Germany, near the border of the Czech Republic. According to her aunt, their family had been in Germany since 900 AD. Her father, Gilbert, and mother, Irma, owned a dry goods store in town, and the family resided in a comfortable upstairs apartment. Gilbert, who had served in the military under the Kaiser during WWI, was a savvy businessman with a charismatic smile. Life was good for their family – until the cancer of a growing sentiment turned their country against them. 

Hitler officially came into power the year before Liz was born in 1933. His first objective was to consolidate power and eliminate his political opposition. He then turned his attentions to the objects of his ire. The assault against Jewish citizens began in April of that same year with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later, all Jewish civil workers were dismissed. In May, thousands of Nazi students stormed university libraries throughout Germany and held massive book burnings in an ultra-nationalistic effort to cleanse the culture of "un-Germanic" writings and restore the country to the "former glory" Hitler had promised his followers. The growing malignant tide rose and crested the first time in what came to be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. 

On the evening of November 9, 1938, the rising Nazi regime orchestrated an onslaught of antisemitic violence in Germany. The nationwide riot earned the name Kristallnacht – a reference to the broken glass from shattered store windows that littered the streets in the morning's aftermath. What was designed to appear as an unplanned outburst of popular anger against Jews in response to the shooting of a German diplomat by a Polish-Jewish student in Paris, was actually a state-coordinated act of vandalism and arson perpetuated by the SS and Hitler Youth groups. The living nightmare resulted in the burning of synagogues, beatings, deaths, and the imprisonment of many Jewish men, in addition to anyone who was black, gay, Romani (Gypsy), or opposers of the Third Reich. The night of violence was a declaration. There would be no safe corner in Germany for non-Aryans or political opponents, who Hitler referred to as “the threat from within."

Along with 30,000 other men, the Gestapo took Liz's father away that night, and although she has little memory of her father leaving, it left a lasting impression on her older sister, Gerta, and, of course, on their mother. At the time, Dachau, where Gilbert was taken, was referred to as a 're-education' camp. The machinery of mass extermination, or "the final solution", had yet to be set into motion, but the foundations of genocide were being laid, and few ever returned from the camps. Correspondence from an uncle in the United States, who had access to media that had been silenced in Germany, contained a plea for the remaining family to leave the country immediately. Liz's mother was sure she would never see her husband again, and she began to plan escape for herself, her daughters, and their grandmother. 

One had to be an immediate family member to receive a visa to leave Germany for another country. There would be no skirting the bureaucracy. Because of this, Liz’s grandmother, Fanny, would have to secure her own visa and Liz’s mother refused to leave without her. The months passed, and as they waited, they watched their world shrink as hope for escape dangled just out of reach. They applied to Cuba, Argentina, and the United States and were prepared to go wherever they were accepted. Finally, Fanny’s papers came through, and it was decided that they would try their luck in the United States.

As Irma and Fanny made preparations to leave with the children, a man with an all-too-familiar gait, thin but smiling, came walking down the street like an apparition from the past. Elizabeth's father had returned from Dachau, where he had been imprisoned for six months. No words could describe the emotions that must have accompanied that tender and timely reunion. It is assumed that a former employee of their store, Marie, who was married to a local politician, had pulled the right strings to free Gilbert from the camp. Meanwhile, word had recently circulated through the neighborhood that the Gestapo was preparing another round-up. Liz and her family left her childhood home for a hotel in Munich, where they stayed out of sight, anxiously awaiting the pending pieces of travel to fall into place.

Finally, the family of five acquired passage on a steamship headed west. They moved quickly and boarded a train for the shores of Italy with nothing but their papers and a few belongings. The ship that awaited them there, the SS George Washington, was bound for the harbor in New York City. The journey took several weeks, and the ship eventually made port in New York on April 1, 1940. More than 1,200 ships carrying well over 100,000 Jewish refugees arrived in New York between March 1938, when Germany overtook neighboring Austria, and October 1941, when Jews were officially forbidden to leave the country.

Few of Liz's extended family would be fortunate enough to escape the rising horrors. Most would not. One uncle, who was married to a non-Jewish German, managed to hide out the war in his basement. Several times, his wife, with a fierce frown, convinced the visiting Gestapo that she had kicked her Jewish husband out of the house. Many other family members who were taken to Auschwitz were never seen again. The "re-education" camp where Liz's father was held soon earned its title of a death camp. Dachau became a model for Nazi concentration camps where the cruel efficiency of dehumanization included medical experimentation, torture, and the on-site cremation of untold thousands in an attempt to "root out" what Hitler called the "poisoned blood of the country."

In America, survival meant starting over. Liz’s father found work in a scissor factory, clocking in at dusk and returning home at dawn when her mother left to clean houses. Slowly, they built a life—not the life they had lost, but a new life forged in resilience. Liz remembers taking in boarders at their New York apartment – Jewish Germans who had just arrived in the States. Her grandmother, who stayed home with the girls, made their fellow refugees coffee and mended their socks while they, too, attempted to find their place in the new world. 

Liz's mother and father eventually scraped enough money together to open a hardware business and they helped both Gerta and Liz through school. After graduating from Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey, Liz married a physician in 1956 and started a family of her own. The two divorced 20 years later, and soon after, Liz left the East Coast behind with her boyfriend, Howard, for yet another new life – this time, in the wide-open spaces of the West. 

They settled in a little house outside Crawford, where they opened an antique store called The Ark. Liz has lived there for 44 years now, and although she lost Howard several years past, she doesn't regret a moment of her time in the North Fork Valley. She has been a librarian, a waitress, a DJ on the radio, and an avid collector of records. She moved her shop, renamed The Ark II, to the old Hotchkiss Hotel, where she greeted curious customers for several years. On the Western Slope of the Rockies, Liz built a life untethered from the shadows of the past – though her past was never forgotten. And while it's downright impossible to get her to say an unkind word of anyone or to discuss politics of any kind, she understands the importance of her story. 

Liz's family has given her 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren to date. Her legacy is immense. She is thankful for her family, her many friends and the quiet life she made for herself in Western Colorado. At the close of our conversation, she offered me a sweet smile and said, "The story of Liz. I always think, here I am, sitting in Crawford, Colorado. It's been a long, strange trip from Germany." Those lucky enough to know her are so glad she made the trip. 

Over the course of six years in Germany, six million Jews, as well as countless other non-Aryans and opponents of the Third Reich, were imprisoned, dehumanized and murdered solely for their race, their beliefs, or their refusal to conform to the single-minded authoritarian ideals of a powerful few. Her story is ever a reminder of a dark past with the potential to repeat itself and of the countless people who would never be allowed to live out their lives in peace.