On November 9, 1938, my great-grandfather Hugo was beaten by Nazi paramilitaries and sent to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp forty minutes outside of Berlin. Nearly two years earlier, at the age of sixteen, my grandfather Uli had left Germany by himself to live with family in America. Hugo had been shot in the butt while serving in World War I. He survived, the bullet ripping through his diary and denting the canteen in his back pocket, and his status as an injured World War I veteran protected our family from some of the earliest anti-Jewish laws following Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. But as conditions progressively worsened and Uli could no longer attend school, his family thought it best to get him out of the country.

Hugo was one of thirty thousand Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps between November 9 and 11, 1938. Days earlier, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee living in Paris, assassinated a German diplomat. Germans responded by imposing collective punishment on Germany’s Jewish population, staging a state-backed pogrom infamously known as “Kristallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass.” German mobs set ablaze and broke the windows of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues, blanketing the streets with shattered glass while assaulting and arresting Jews en masse.

A Christian colleague successfully secured Hugo’s release two weeks later, and Hugo was immediately rushed to a hospital due to internal bleeding from multiple beatings. In 1939, Hugo, my great-grandmother Lotte, and my grandfather’s twin sister, Isa, escaped to England. Lotte died from cancer in England before the war was over, and Uli never saw her again.