November 9, 1938: Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass. It was the night anti-Semitic fervor in Nazi Germany boiled over. Jewish homes, businesses, schools, and synagogues were ransacked and burned. Inge Stanton was only 8 years old then but she remembers that nightmare all too well. She hid in her family's attic in a house in the small town of Lichtenfels, Germany.
"I remember having to be very quiet, I remember the crashing and the screaming and the sirens," Inge, now 89, said.
Her father, Alfred Marx, and her uncle, Sigmund Marx, were arrested that night and rounded up with 30,000 other Jewish men. Among the Marx brothers' confiscated possessions were their driver's licenses, which somehow ended up in Whippany, New Jersey.
German students traveled to the Jewish Federation of Greater Metrowest New Jersey, where 13 Jewish licenses are now on display.
"Every part of history consists of so many individual stories and by looking at those individual lives you just get a completely different connection to history," said Luise Aumüller, a student.
The licenses all come from the town hall archives in Lichtenfels, where the girls and their high school classmates spent the past two years trying to find any of the victims' relatives. They were able to connect with descendants of all 13 licenses.
Lisa Salco is Inge's younger cousin, which means Lisa is Sigmund Marx's granddaughter. She was reunited with Sigmund's license, as well as the license of Alfred Oppenheimer, her great uncle on the other side of her family. He didn't survive the Holocaust.
"A part of our family that was left behind, and to be reunited with these licenses, it's like we brought them home," Lisa said.
"All the work, all the research they did after 80 years to find every one of these people, some are not alive, but there are descendants," Inge said. "I'm really thrilled and amazed."
The students told FOX 5 NY there are no Jews left in their hometown but they hope their work has shed some light on the rich history of a culture that was once so prevalent there.
--DANA ARSCHIN
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