How german jews reacted to nazi persecution from 1933-1942 Essay

How german jews reacted to nazi persecution from 1933-1942 - Essay Example She deliberately and openly flouted this rule and continued to work until leaving the country several months later (Catts, p39). Perhaps her limited experiences of persecution and of the Nazis and Gestapo are what enabled her to defy the law that was intended to prevent her from working, in that she had not been made aware through experience of the possible consequences of her actions. Josef Stone and his family left Frankfurt and Germany just a few months after Gertrude Catts (Stone, p38), but those few months were enough to make his experiences of Nazi persecution quite different. Stone recalls how his family and neighbors began to feel insecure and mistrustful (Stone, p36), afraid to show friendliness towards one another in case it was noticed by the Nazis. He describes how he was arrested on Kristallnacht and subsequently released (perhaps because he was only sixteen years old), and how his father was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau two days later. Kristallnacht was a turning p oint for Jews living in Germany – after this point, says Stone, nobody felt comfortable living in Germany any more. Many of the documents describe similar experiences, and for most of the narrators, anti-Semitism was experienced on a day-to-day basis. For example, Catts and Weinberg say that they or their parents were forbidden to work in German companies or to work at all and Rosenthal describes how her father was forced to do various types of labor. Many of them describe further incidents of segregation of Jews and Germans and general anti-Semitism, some more pervasive than others. Herta Rosenthal, for example, mentions that because she did not â€Å"look Jewish† (Rosenthal, p67) she was able to escape some anti-Semitic behavior – she was served in German shops where her Jewish-looking mother was refused service. Most of the narrators describe incidents of jeering and name-calling at the hands of