HORROR OF KRISTALLNACHT RECALLED 87 YEARS ON

As she made her way to school alone, 10-year-old Inge Gershfield heard screams and laughter before the acrid smell of burning hit her.

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

Hurrying down the street, which was littered with shattered glass, Inge's caution turned to horror as she saw the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue, where her family worshipped, in flames.

Uniformed Nazi thugs were singing their party's anthem, Horst-Wessel-Lied - The Flag Raised High as they carried books and materials out of the Jewish bookshop opposite the synagogue, laughing and taunting the terrified workers who were powerless to stop them.

Now 97, Inge remembers every horrifying detail from Kristallnacht the night of broken glass on November 9 and 10, 1938.

The November pogroms against the Jewish population of Germany and Austria resulted in more than 3000 men being arrested and taken to Nazi concentration camps, some 7000 Jewish businesses destroyed and hundreds of synagogues and prayer rooms wrecked by Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitaries.

Jewish homes were also ransacked without warning by Nazis, joined by Hitler Youth members and German citizens.

"I walked past [the Nazis] totally perturbed, seeing various things in the street, but I didn't know what was going on," Inge recounts from her home in London.

"When I got to school I was greeted by a throng of teachers. They told me, 'go straight home, terrible things are happening. Don't talk to anybody. Go home as fast as you can'".

Inge fled for the modest Berlin apartment she shared with her parents, Alfons and Alice Lewinski, only to find her mother distraught and her father missing.

"He had been taken away by the Nazis all of the men in our block had been taken to Dachau," Inge recalls. "Fortunately he had taken his Iron Cross, which he won in the First World War when he was fighting for the Kaiser, and showed them.

"He was released after being held for a day and a night."