Striking Back
Offire
e.w/ enirkir
Second It"
Paul Kohn's
For Shoah survivor, Sept. 11
brings memories of Kristallnacht.
La Difference
JULIE WIENER
al & Banquet Ce/lt:e
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
U
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AT FRANKLIN
ntil last month, there was
Blank 48 Hours
always one seminal date in
He is not sure what happened in those
Fred Gompertz's memory:
two days or why he stayed put. He
Nov. 9.
recalls passing out at one point and
On that day in 1938, Gompertz,
falling asleep "to escape." Unable to
then 14, woke in the middle of the
get up, he kept thinking about what
night to "a tremendous explosion of
he'd been told in kindergarten in
glass." While he hid upstairs in his
Germany: If something unusual hap-
family's apartment in the German
town of Gelsenkirchen, Nazi
thugs vandalized and ransacked
his father's clothing store below.
"We were scared to look out
the window," he says, "scared to
be seen."
Kristallnacht — the "Night of
Broken Glass" — heralded the
end of Gompertz's life in
Germany. While his family was
fortunate enough to escape to
the United States and build new
lives — Gompertz became a
globe-trotting fur designer
— he
b
never forgot
bthe fear, the broken
b
glass and the pain of being
uprooted from his home.
Almost 63 years later,
‘z.1'. AIL
Gompertz has again been
Fred Gompertz, who hid for two days in his
uprooted from his home, a 34th-
apartment just yards away from the World Trade
story apartment in Battery Park
Center devastation, tells how Sept. 11 reminded
City, an upscale, meticulously
him of his experience as a boy in Germany .
landscaped development over-
looking New York Harbor —
pens, just stay where you are so your
and just yards away from the World
parents will know where to find you.
Trade Center.
He remembers listening to a
For now, the events of Sept. 11 —
portable, battery-operated radio and
which came as Gompertz was sitting
hearing that Battery Park City had been
at his kitchen table, reading the news-
evacuated. He peered into the hall, but
paper — remain a whirl of disconnect-
ed, nightmarish fragments.
it was dark and eerily quiet, and he
"didn't dare" venture down the more
A phone call, in which a friend in
than 30 flights of stairs in the dark.
Connecticut suggested he come stay
The experience "brings me back to
with him for a while. Peering out the
Nov. 9," Gompertz says several weeks
window and seeing a swarm of people
later. He is staying temporarily at the
on the esplanade outside, some run-
Tribeca Hotel.
ning, some with faces turned upward
He darts back and forth across the
in horror. Flames coming out of the
years, from Nov. 9 to Sept. 11, stop-
World Trade Center's twin towers.
ping at one point to talk about a
Reports on television about a terrorist
recent visit to his hometown at the
attack. Then everything going dark —
German government's invitation.
the window covered in a cloud of
Suddenly, he is back in the present,
black soot, the television going dead,
all electricity stopping.
noting how his son recently got close to
the ruins of the World Financial Center's
Gompertz remained in his apart-
Winter Garden, a huge glass atrium that
ment for almost two days, until his son
Rh
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blister out of winter and made it a wonderland;
THE
— who first was told that Gompertz
had been evacuated to a New Jersey
shelter — came to rescue him.
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