The thugs threw everything throwable to the street. As dusk fell, looters appeared.

Kristallnacht
November 10, 1938. Kristallnacht.

Our father's best friend from his days in the Imperial German Army, the local carpenter, Julius Klein, known as "Schreiner Klein"—posted himself in front of our house with the farmer's weapon of choice, his three-pronged pitchfork. He announced that anyone touching anything would find himself with a prong or two in his/her belly.

He stood guard all night, ashamed, he said later, to be born German.

Our mother, who had sought refuge in nearby Kirn with her boys, returned in the morning and gave most everything away and arranged for the clean-up of the street.

As mother could not prepare food for her meals, our next-door neighbours, the Franzmann family, whose son Rudolf had apprenticed in father's store, handed her some of their own home-cooked food over the back wall, hidden from view from the street.

The house and its contents, including the store inventory, were sold for a token amount to a Nazi sympathizer from the nearby town of Bärenbach, a man named Bickler, who promptly moved into his new furnished house and took over the prosperous "J.Moritz" dry-goods store.

Per the sales contract, part of the purchase price "paid to the Jew" was to be remitted to the State, in payment of the damages wrought by the spontaneous mob; Bickler was, for his part, to pay to the State the difference between the agreed sales price and the true assessed value.

Obviously being well-connected to those then in power, he saw no need to ever do so.