In the library of his Pawtucket home Thursday, Albert Silverstein displays a photo of his parents, Henry and Pepi Silverstein.  Times photo/Butch Adams 

By RUSS OLIVO

PAWTUCKET — Albert Silverstein was not quite 3 years old that night in 1938, when the Nazi mobs stormed the Jewish neighborhoods near his hometown of Graz, Austria, burning businesses, smashing windows and brutally rounding up Jews for deportation to concentration camps and prisons.

His father, Henry, was one of them. He got picked up in a train station the next morning in Vienna, where he had been desperately seeking exit visas so his family could flee the growing persecution of the Jews in Austria.
“He’s beaten,” says Silverstein. “He’s beaten so badly his ribs are broken. He has a concussion. So he can’t go to a concentration camp. He goes to a prison infirmary.”
The night Silverstein is talking about, of course, is known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass — Nov. 9, 1938.
In less than two days, some 30,000 people were arrested and over 100 killed as Jewish enclaves were ravaged in the Nazi-controlled lands of Europe, including Germany and Austria.
History records it as the beginning of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of the Jews that became a cornerstone of the Nazi manifesto, claiming some 6 million lives before World War II eviscerated the Nazi juggernaut.
Up until then, the growing epidemic of violence against Jews in Europe might have been attributed to disorganized bands of brutish bigots, but after Kristallnacht, no one could deny that the Nazis were pulling the strings.
“It was the time when violence against Jews became officially sanctioned,” says Silverstein. “One of the things that Kristallnacht did was make the rest of Europe face up to the plight of the Jews.”
The Silversteins — Henry, wife Pepi and young Albert — had already been trying to flee Austria since the previous March, when the Nazis formally annexed Austria.
With the takeover, the institutionalization of anti-Semitism that had gradually fallen into place in Germany over a period of several years as the Nazis rose to power suddenly descended upon Austria like a clap of thunder.
When the siege exploded in the turmoil of Kristallnacht, the family’s desperate struggle to survive ramped into high gear.
A retired professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, Silverstein, 72, tells the story seated in the living room of his historic home at 80 Dryden Ave., where he lives with his wife, Myrna, and their two terriers, Max and Charlie.
But it is a story he often tells to schoolchildren, as a volunteer for the Rhode Island Holocaust Education Resource Center. The organization, in partnership with Temple Emanu-El of Providence, is also marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht with a special concert at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium on Nov. 9 (see related story, page one).
“It’s important,” says Silverstein. “Throughout the history of Western civilization Jews have been targeted as victims. If people forget about that it’s easy for it to happen all over again.”

SILVERSTEIN’S FATHER and uncle were making a good living operating a clothing store in Graz when the Nazis annexed Austria. Suddenly new laws were stripping Jews of citizenship, due process and property rights. Two weeks after the annexation, two Nazi agents showed up at the store and ordered the Jewish proprietors to leave — the government was taking over the business.
His father could see the writing on the wall, said Silverstein. He began trying any way he could to get a visa to leave Austria. That’s why he was in Vienna when Kristallnacht took place. He was attempting to obtain government papers to take the family to Costa Rica.
As the rampage unfolded, the Nazis used every pretext imaginable to arrest Jews and cart them off to concentration camps. When they spotted the telltale gold star on Silverstein’s jacket (Jews were required to display the mark of identification after the Nazis took power in Austria) he was taken to a police station in Vienna and charged with smuggling foreign currency.
The currency in question is actually a $10 bill his sister in New York had sent him years earlier as a present for his bar mitzvah. He had saved it in his wallet as a souvenir.
Not long after, while his father was incarcerated, two plainclothes policemen visited the young Silverstein and his mother at their apartment in Graz.
“We got evicted from our apartment in Graz and we are told to leave the city,” says Silverstein. “We go to Vienna. Essentially we live in hiding. We are unwelcome persons.”
Pepi Silverstein did some detective work in Vienna in attempts to learn where the Nazis were holding her husband. She eventually located him and managed to obtain forged documents indicating that he had an exit visa to travel to Shanghai. A prisoner of the Nazis for six weeks, the elder Silverstein was freed and promptly went into hiding in the basement of a relative’s tailor shop in Vienna.
After Kristallnacht, neighboring governments of Europe were beginning to mount humanitarian efforts to counter the violence and discrimination against the Jews. The British parliament, for example, helped establish research farms known as “agricultural stations” in England where Jewish refugees could live and work.
By March 1939, Henry Silverstein escaped from Austria and made his way to one of the agricultural stations in Kent, England.
Another legendary humanitarian effort — this one aimed at saving the lives of Jewish children — was known as the kinderstransport, or children’s train. Funded by Jewish relief organizations and the British government, the effort led to the emigration of some 10,000 Jewish children from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg aboard railroad cars amid the rise of the Third Reich.
A few months after his father arrived in England, Albert’s mother tearfully put her son aboard one of those trains to meet up with his father. Pepi stayed behind while Albert, not yet 4 years old, embarked on the 72-hour trip to England alone, surrounded by strangers.
Most of his fellow passengers were teen-aged boys and girls, bound for boarding schools and foster homes while they rode out the Holocaust, never knowing whether they would see their parents again, says Silverstein. He was paralyzed with fright and uncertainty as he bade his mother farewell, lugging a small brown suitcase filled with his belongings. Silverstein still keeps the suitcase as a reminder of how “absolutely isolated and frightened I felt.”
“There were other young children, too, mostly because they were siblings of older teenagers,” says Silverstein. “Or it was like my situation. They had a father or family waiting for them in England.”
In August 1939, Silverstein’s mother finally escaped from Austria, too. She climbed aboard the very last kinderstransport to England as an adult chaperone. Weeks later, Europe was at war with the Nazis, firing the opening salvos of World War II.
The family remained in England until October 1940, after the visa Henry Silverstein had applied for more than two years earlier finally came through. Traveling aboard a Cunard ocean liner, the Silversteins sailed to New York, where they resided briefly with Albert’s aunt until the family moved to Florida, where he grew up. Ultimately, he went to college and earned a doctorate in psychology, teaching at URI for over 40 years before retiring several years ago and moving to Pawtucket.
It may sound like a happy ending, but it’s not really, says Silverstein. It’s hard to find a Jew from Europe of the Nazi era who didn’t lose someone in the Holocaust.
“Everybody lost somebody,” says Silverstein. “I was very lucky. Those 10,000 children who left on the kinderstransport, most of them never saw their parents alive again.”