By Kimberly Chin

Personal memories of Kristallnacht were shared Wednesday night with members of the Hillel and University community.

Fanya Heller, a Holocaust survivor, presented her audience with experiences of the night and its effect on her life then after.

Kristallnacht, also known as “the night of broken glass,” was a two-night anti-Jewish riot in November 1938. Orchestrated by Nazi Germans, the riots resulted in the burning and destruction of 1,100 synagogues and 7,500 businesses and homes, the arrest of 30,000 Jews and the death of 91 Jews.

After the Nazi regime, Heller said that she picked her life up from the ashes and moved to the United States in 1963 with her three children.

She pursued an education with a B.A. and M.A. in psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York. She also studied art history at Columbia University and was even offered a Ph.D, which she declined in order to give people the message of her past. She told her listeners, “Knowledge is power.”

After the death of her husband in 1963, Heller decided to write memoirs to preserve her experiences during the Nazi reign and later published a book that was recently revised called Love in a World of Sorry: A Teenage Girl’s Memoirs. She was 15 years old at the time of the publication, which she said would explain her favorite audience: teenagers.

She works mostly with inner-city school teenagers, saying, “I love them because they’re my age, around 15 when I had experienced the war.” The teenagers that she works with usually come from broken families and a lot of women who already have children of their own.

“The kids are needy. They need help, they need love, they need attention,” Heller said during an interview. “I tell them, ‘No matter how bad things are, no matter how poor Jews were, they always stressed education. Education is power.'”

She said that she recalls being indoctrinated with communism after the agreement between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of Russia to divide her home country of Poland.

“When I was young, we were forced to watch hanging executions and applaud. We studied only Russian for every high school became Russian. College was forbidden,” Heller added. She emphasized the need to have an education for the opportunities which she was not afforded at the time.

“From where I came from, there was not even Kristallnacht, there were killings right away,” Heller continued. “The killings were just a stepping stone, the last straw. They would’ve done it anyway.”

During her speech, she spoke of her mantra, “Never again.” Heller explained that she has trials against skepticism, which occurs all the time.

“I have to tell those who are in denial that ‘I was there, I saw it,'” Heller said. Despite the skepticism, she continues to travel and spread her word. “I have to put a face to the suffering, to the Holocaust.”

However, she also told her audience of the fears she has developed over the years.

“I still have scars. It is when I hear a knock of a door and I fear that it might be the police who are after me. I fear the sound of an airplane passing by. I fear starvation and that is why I carry food wherever I go,” Heller said.

Despite these fears, Heller said that she still keeps her head high and continues to speak to those who are willing to listen from Israel to American college campuses, South Carolina to Sweden. “I speak to 150 kids and I say ‘If I help one of you, then I’ve done my job.'”

Fanya Heller speaks about her life after the Nazi invasion.