On the night of 8th/9th November this year it was the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht. I well remember Joe Stirling sharing his very clear memories of that night in his home village of Nickenich when three men in Nazi uniforms knocked down the family’s front door at 4am. These were Joe’s very words as he told me his story in December 2011, our very first interview for his biography in his comfortable Norwich home.

“I remember our door being smashed down on the night of 8-9 November, 1938.  My father got up and saw these brown shirts, not  people from our village, they might have been from Andernaach or other nearby town.  My father said ‘What are you doing?’  They said, ‘Get dressed, you are arrested’.  My father said ‘Arrested? What have I done wrong?’  One of them hit him across the face and said, ‘You are a Jew.  That’s enough’.  While he was being arrested they toured through our living area and opened all the drawers, through everything out, china and glass on the floor, and trampled on it incase anything had survived.  Just wrecked the place, you know.  My mother also got up, and I got up and I remember she was holding me, I was nearly fourteen then.  There was no suggestion of arresting me, I was not old enough.  My father was taken away, there was no clue of where, and there was no way of finding out, or whether he would be back, whether he was charged, not that they need to charge people to hold them.  Everyone already knew about the concentration camps.  This was one of the first things Hitler did when he came to power.  Anyone who openly criticised him or the Nazi party, they didn’t go to court or anything, they were political prisoners and locked up in the camps – these were not Jews, no Jewish people were making speeches against the Nazis.  Lots of people in Germany were arrested, some never seen again.  They probably died of starvation or whatever. And Dachau, which was the big camp in Bavaria where my father was taken.  We learnt about that when he came out.”

I recall being stunned at this elderly man’s ability to speak so cooly about an event in his life when he was just 14 years old, that must have been transformational. Just two days ago, a German man whom I met in Koblenz in 2013, sent me this photograph from a guided tour of the Stolpersteine in Koblenz, the brass plaques set into the pavement outside the last known address of victims of the Nazi Regime. They came across those dedicated to Joe’s parents, Ida and Alfred Stern, who both perished in Sobibor in the summer of 1942.

They will always be remembered.