Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in America

Friday, September 1, 2023

Featured Guest: Holocaust Survivor, Fred Behrend

In November 1938, 12-year-old Fred Behrend witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), seeing synagogue after synagogue torched in the city of Cologne. Fred did not know that back home, his father, like 30,000 other Jewish males, had been arrested for transport to a concentration camp. His father was released several weeks later on the condition that his family leave Germany as soon as possible, never to return. They escaped to Cuba, the only place that would take them, and, eventually, America.

In his later years, Fred began to speak to schoolchildren about his Holocaust past. In 2018, he was speaking to students at a Jewish day school on the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht about that fateful day. He was telling about the Baum family, whom he lived with at the time – 65 miles from home – so he could attend a Jewish-run secular school after Nazis banned Jews from public school. The head of the day school disappeared from the room for 10 minutes, then returned with a cellphone. A miracle was about to happen.