Thus, every once in a long while one was glad that Judge Landau had lost his battle, and the first such moment occurred even before the battle had started. For Mr. Hausner's first background witness did not look as though he had volunteered. He was an old man, wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, small, very frail, with sparse white hair and beard, holding himself quite erect; in a sense, his name was “famous,” and one understood why the prosecution wanted to begin its picture with him. He was Zindel Grynszpan, father of Herschel Grynszpan, who, on November 7, 1938, at the age of seventeen, had walked up to the German embassy in Paris and shot to death its third secretary, the young Legationsrat Ernst vom Rath. The assassination had triggered the pogroms in Germany and Austria, the so-called Kristallnacht of November 9, which was indeed a prelude to the Final Solution, but with whose preparation Eichmann had nothing to do. The motives for Grynszpan's act have never been cleared up, and his brother, whom the prosecution also put on the stand, was remarkably reluctant to talk about it. The court took it for granted that it was an act of vengeance for the expulsion of some seventeen thousand Polish Jews, the Grynszpan family among them, from German territory during the last days of October, 1938, but it is generally known that this explanation is unlikely. Herschel Grynszpan was a psychopath, unable to finish school, who for years had knocked about Paris and Brussels, being expelled from both places. His lawyer in the French court that tried him introduced a confused story of homosexual relations, and the Germans, who later had him extradited, never put him on trial. (There are rumors that he survived the war—as though to substantiate the “paradox of Auschwitz” that those Jews who had committed a criminal offense were spared.) Vom Rath was a singularly inadequate victim, he had been shadowed by the Gestapo because of his openly anti-Nazi views and his sympathy for Jews; the story of his homosexuality was probably fabricated by the Gestapo. Grynszpan might have acted as an unwitting tool of Gestapo agents in Paris, who could have wanted to kill two birds with one stone—create a pretext for pogroms in Germany and get rid of an opponent to the Nazi regime—without realizing that they could not have it both ways, that is, could not slander vom Rath as a homosexual having illicit relations with Jewish boys and also make of him a martyr and a victim of “world Jewry.”
However that may have been, it is a fact that the Polish government in the fall of 1938 decreed that all Polish Jews residing in Germany would lose their nationality by October 29; it probably was in possession of information that the German government intended to expel these Jews to Poland and wanted to prevent this. It is more than doubtful that people like Mr. Zindel Grynszpan even knew that such a decree existed. He had come to Germany in 1911, a young man of twenty-five, to open a grocery store in Hanover, where, in due time, eight children were born to him. In 1938, when catastrophe overcame him, he had been living in Germany for twenty-seven years, and, like many such people, he had never bothered to change his papers and to ask for naturalization. Now he had come to tell his story, carefully answering questions put to him by the prosecutor; he spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery, using a minimum of words.
“On the twenty-seventh of October, 1938, it was a Thursday night, at eight o'clock, a policeman came and told us to come to Region [police station] Eleven. He said: ‘You are going to come back immediately; don't take anything with you, only your passports.’” Grynszpan went, with his family, a son, a daughter, and his wife. When they arrived at the police station he saw “a large number of people, some sitting, some standing, people were crying. They [the police] were shouting, ‘Sign, sign, sign.’… I had to sign, all of them did. One of us did not, his name was, I believe, Gershon Silber, and he had to stand in the corner for twenty-four hours. They took us to the concert hall, and… there were people from all over town, about six hundred people. There we stayed until Friday night, about twenty-four hours, yes, until Friday night…. Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners’ lorries, about twenty men in each truck, and they took us to the railroad station. The streets were black with people shouting: ‘Juden raus to Palestine!’… They took us by train to Neubenschen, on the German-Polish border. It was Shabbat morning when we arrived there, six o'clock in the morning. There came trains from all sorts of places, from Leipzig, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, Biederfeld, Bremen. Together we were about twelve thousand people…. It was the Shabbat, the twenty-ninth of October…. When we reached the border we were searched to see if anybody had any money, and anybody who had more than ten marks—the balance was taken away. This was the German law, no more than ten marks could be taken out of Germany. The Germans said, ‘You didn't bring any more with you when you came, you can't take out any more.’” They had to walk a little over a mile to the Polish border, since the Germans intended to smuggle them into Polish territory. “The S.S. men were whipping us, those who lingered they hit, and blood was flowing on the road. They tore away our suitcases from us, they treated us in a most brutal way, this was the first time that I'd seen the wild brutality of the Germans. They shouted at us, ‘Run! Run!’ I was hit and fell into the ditch. My son helped me, and he said: ‘Run, Father, run, or you'll die!’ When we got to the open border… the women went in first. The Poles knew nothing. They called a Polish general and some officers who examined our papers, and they saw that we were Polish citizens, that we had special passports. It was decided to let us enter. They took us to a village of about six thousand people, and we were twelve thousand. The rain was driving hard, people were fainting—on all sides one saw old men and women. Our suffering was great. There was no food, since Thursday we had not eaten…” They were taken to a military camp and put into “stables, as there was no room elsewhere…. I think it was our second day [in Poland]. On the first day, a lorry with bread came from Poznan, that was on Sunday. And then I wrote a letter to France… to my son: ‘Don't write any more letters to Germany. We are now in Zbaszyn.’”