Ilse Stanley - Kristallnacht and After: Late 1938 and 1939

Kristallnacht and After: Late 1938 and 1939

After Kristallnacht, when more than 200 synagogues all over Germany—including Ilse's beloved "House"—were torched and destroyed, the situation worsened dramatically. By 1939 the Jewish population of Berlin, which had numbered 160,000 in 1933, had dwindled to 75,000. Trips to the camps were out of the question, but Ilse continued helping Jews leave the country legally. She kept in contact with "Fritz", and when the Gestapo began interviewing people planning to leave Germany in order to try to prevent them from leaving, he found a way to warn her. Finally, very reluctantly, Ilse realized that she, along with her family, needed to leave Germany. They left separately: first her father, in March 1939, then her husband, then Ilse and her son Manfred.

Five days before Ilse's planned departure, her mother was summoned to the Gestapo on Alexanderplatz. Ilse went in her stead. (Once again, her acting past unexpectedly surfaced: the younger of the two interrogators recognized her.) After her mother's situation was clarified, Ilse made a near-fatal mistake: she mentioned her own impending departure. Questioning ensued, and, having nothing to lose, Ilse spoke quietly and openly. She spoke of living in fear since Kristallnacht, and of the need to live without such fear. Then she talked about presenting flowers to the Emperor at the age of six, about Kaiser Wilhelm's abdication and flight from Germany on November 9, 1918, and about Kristallnacht, which happened exactly twenty years after the Emperor's flight (November 9, 1938). One of her two interrogators broke down sobbing. She was allowed to leave the office, and three days later, she and Manfred left for England. After a brief stop there, they sailed from Southampton on the SS Deutschland on August 4, 1939, arriving in the U.S. on August 11.