“I’ve been feeling the ’30s are being repeated all over again,” Evelyn Konrad told The Post in the wake of growing antisemitism in America and across the world.
The 94-year-old New Yorker was a 9-year-old girl on Nov. 9-10, 1938 — when Nazis ravaged the Jewish community in her hometown of Vienna, Austria, in the notorious Kristallnacht invasion that preceded World War II.
The event separated Evelyn from her friend Ruth Zimbler for more than 80 years. But now the two have been reunited in New York City, and are clinging to their friendship as modern-day fear grows.
“I’m scared for Jews around the world,” said Zimbler.
Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” saw the killing of nearly 100 Jews and the destruction of scores of synagogues and Jewish businesses. It also marked the first mass arrest of Jews based solely on their religion —“men and boys ripped from their homes,” recalled Zimbler, whose father was among them.
During the pogrom, Nazis rounded up some 30,000 Jewish males, 13 and older, for deportation to concentration camps, many of whom were ultimately murdered.
“We couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end,” Zimbler said of the attack, which saw Nazis loot her family home “without a pillow or blanket left in the place.”
It was a world away from the girls’ formerly carefree life, when they would visit the local cinema owned by Konrad’s grandmother — “the only one where you could see Shirley Temple movies,” Zimbler recalled.
A month after Kristallnacht, Zimbler’s parents sent her and her six-year-old brother on the first-ever Kindertransport rescue train to Holland. The scared youngsters took refuge with other Jewish children in a manor home at the Hague before traveling via a stormy 10-day boat ride to Hoboken, NJ, nearly a year later. Their parents miraculously fled Nazi-occupied Europe and reconnected with their children soon after.
When Kristallnacht happened, Konrad had been traveling with her father — a “world class” soccer player father — throughout Europe. By the time she returned to Vienna in May 1939, her school friends were scattered and her beloved city was “terrifying … I could hear the jackboots on the streets.”
She recalled asking her father, “If the Germans win, will that mean they were they right about the Jews?” before the war officially broke out in September 1939. “That’s an awful thing for a 10-year-old to have to worry about,” Konrad said.
She and her parents arrived in America a year later via a cargo ship, but it wasn’t the land of the free that she expected.
“Father Coughlin had his big presence,” Konrad said of the Detroit-based radio personality and Nazi sympathizer who wielded great influence in the ’30s. She also questioned the “so-called melting pot” that found the country sharply divided along ethnic communities.
Both women married and raised families in NYC: Zimbler in Chelsea and Konrad on the Upper East Side. Zimbler earned a BA from Brooklyn College and worked in retail, while Konrad graduated from Stanford University and became a journalist before later picking up a law degree from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — at the age of 76. She still works today, at 94.
They figured they would never see each other again, after the Nazis tore apart their lives. But then Konrad spotted a 2018 Post article on the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht that featured Zimbler, and eventually tracked her down.
“Everyone thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread,” said Zimbler of finding her old friend. “We love each other.”
“You’re damn right,” Konrad said as Zimbler embraced her. “And we owe our renewed friendship to The Post.”
In the wake of the devastating massacre in Israel on October 7, the women see unsettling parallels between the antisemitism of their youth and now.
The outpouring of hate in America — including university professors openly celebrating the Hamas attacks against Israelis and young people in NYC viciously ripping down posters of the abducted hostages — has left a deep impression.
“That scares the hell out of me,” said Zimbler, adding that “it’s very hard to accept” the hate.
Still, the women remain hopeful. “Life has been good to us — we’ve had our ups and downs, mostly ups; what else can we ask of this world except to convince people that it depends on them to make it better?” said Zimbler. “You can’t leave it to somebody else; you have to do it. Education is the key to this.”
Added Konrad of the October Hamas attacks: “Take pictures, because 10 years from now they’ll deny it ever happened.”