Shattered Crystals: A Talk by Holocaust Survivor, Eve Kugler

Shattered Crystals: A Talk By Holocaust Survivor, Eve Kugler

Wednesday, October 19, 2022 at 12:30 p.m. EDT

Presented by BCC and co-sponsored by OLLI

Online via Zoom.
Free & open to all, registration required.

Forum Credit Available for BCC Students

In October 1938 Eve’s 79-year-old grandfather was arrested along with thousands of other Polish Jews living in Germany and returned to Poland in the first ever Nazi deportation. Ten days later Kristallnacht occurred. Six Nazis rampaged through the family home, destroying household possessions and her grandfather’s sacred Jewish books before marching Eve’s father out of the family home to transport him to Buchenwald, as she and her sister watched. During that night the Nazis smashed the windows of her father’s store, and the next day the Nazis ordered her mother to sweep up shards of glass for hours from the shattered store windows that littered the pavement. Their synagogue, founded by Eve’s grandfather, was incinerated while the fire brigade stood by. Eve’s mother was eventually able to secure her father’s release from Buchenwald. After arriving home, he left for France and the family was evicted from their home. In June 1939 the family fled to France on a forged visa.

When the Second World War broke out, the French interned her father because he was a German citizen. Destitute and fearful for her daughters’ safety, her mother placed the girls in an OSE home for Jewish children outside of Paris where she became a cook. As the Nazis neared Paris in June 1940, the home survived heavy Nazi bombardment. With the fall of Paris and the French surrender, the children were evacuated to central France, where they lived under Nazi occupation. In 1941 the home received a visa for America for a small number of children. Mainly orphan children were chosen, but when at the last minute two lost their place due to illness, Eve and Ruth took their place, leaving her parents and Lea behind. For the next five years Eve lived in New York City in three different foster homes, sometimes separated from her sister.

In the Nazi roundup of Jews in 1942 the French Resistance hid Lea then aged 5 ½ in a Catholic convent. Eve’s parents survived four French concentration camps, twice miraculously spared from deportation to Auschwitz. Her father struggled as a forced laborer on the Nazi project to strengthen the seawall in Calais where they expected the Allied invasion to take place, until he managed an almost unheard-of escape from this camp.

The family was reunited in New York in 1946. Eve worked as a journalist until she moved to London in 1990.

Eve speaks regularly at schools sharing her family’s history. She created and edits Shattered Crystals which contains testimonies of child survivors who attended her high school and is used by educators in the U.S. and Great Britain to teach the Holocaust. Shattered Crystals, her book, about the family’s Holocaust history and a poem about Eve, ‘Grains of Light’, commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Eve speaks regularly in schools, synagogues and to civic groups about this history, and has given presentations throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. She regularly accompanies young people to Poland on the annual March of the Living

Eve was invited to speak at the Jerusalem Post London Conference, March 31, 2022 and before the House of Commons in London on April 3, 2022. Most recently (September 15/16) she gave presentations to students in Leipzig, and Halle and was part of the Stolpersteine dedication in Halle on September 14. She will be presenting in Dubai in November 2022.