Objects in Focus

Bernard's Father

The November Pogrom

This photograph was taken in December 1938. It is of Bernard Grunberg’s father, and was taken immediately after he was released from Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Because he was Jewish, Bernard’s father had been arrested and taken to Buchenwald during the 1938 November Pogrom (also known as Kristallnacht). He was released as he had fought with the German army during the First World War. Bernard managed to see his father one last time before he arrived in England, after which he would never see any of his family again. Bernard’s father was later murdered by the Nazi regime, along with Bernard’s mother and sister.

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Bernard Grunberg was born in 1923 in Lingen, Germany. He lived with his parents and sister. As a boy Bernard experienced anti-Semitic bullying following the rise of Nazism which forced him to leave school. Bernard was studying woodwork at a Jewish college in Berlin when the woodwork shop was destroyed by fire prior to the November Pogrom. When he was 15 years old, Bernard came over to England on the Kindertransport and spent time in arriving children's camps before becoming a farm hand. Bernard later married.

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