'I was woken aged 5 by Nazis coming for my family - forgetting risks it all happening again'

One of the few remaining living witnesses to the terrifying Kristallnacht attacks on Jews and their homes and businesses in 1938 can still remember vividly the day her home was ransacked

Woken by a Gestapo officer pinching her cheek, five-year-old Thea Weiss watched in terrified silence as SS brutes trashed her room.

Now 90, Thea is one of the last remaining survivors of the Nazis’ ­infamous Kristallnacht, which took place 86 years ago this week. And with hatred once more on the rise around the world, Thea warns that forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust risks it all happening again.

Thea has no trouble remembering. On the night of November 9, 1938, she sat in her family’s apartment in Vienna as three Gestapo officers trashed her room, rifling through a linen cupboard for jewellery to steal. She says: “My mother said that, thankfully, I didn’t speak or cry as they woke me. I just stared at them with big eyes as they ransacked the place.”

The Nazis then arrested her father, Meyer, along with other Jewish men from their block, to go to concentration camps. As Thea fled with her mother to her best friend Dora’s flat upstairs, she saw more uniformed men pounding on doors. She says: “I heard smash­­ing glass, screaming, crying voices… it was horrible.”

In the months before, as Adolf Hitler extended his reach into Austria, new antisemitic laws had restricted Jews’ right to take part in civic society. The Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into the German Reich in March – had made things worse for the country’s 200,000 Jews, suddenly excluded from certain professions.

Thea’s au pair, to whom she was very attached, was a teenager called Magda. One day she came to the family in tears saying her Nazi brother had forbidden her from working with Jews. When he came to collect Magda on the back of his motorbike, Thea begged her nanny to run away with her.

She recalls: “The brother looked at me so coldly and told my mother, ‘Take her away’. I never saw Magda again.” The Nazis had closed almost every Jewish nursery, so Thea’s mother Ettel had to leave the family haberdashery business to care for Thea herself.

Speaking exclusively from her home in North London, Thea – now called Thea Val­­man – recalls a walk round the local park shortly before Kristallnacht. She tells us: “I was tired and begging my mother to stop. Mama made me keep going. When I asked why, she said quietly, ‘Because we’re Jews’. The Nazis had made it illegal for Jews to use the park benches.”

The two-day horror became known as the November pogroms, or Kristallnacht. The name is from the sound of breaking glass that filled the air as Nazi thugs across Germany and Austria targeted Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. Around 100 Jews died, and more than 30,000 were arrested and sent to the camps.

In a stroke of luck, Thea’s father managed to break free and ran back to their block where the caretaker, risking his own life, hid him in the cellar – lying to the Gestapo, saying Meyer had fled. Five days later, Thea’s father reappeared upstairs with blood crusted on his face, dirty clothes and a beard. Scared of this stranger who did not speak, little Thea did not realise it was her dad.

She says: “He looked like a tramp, unkempt and dirty. I asked my mother who it was and she just shrugged her shoulders.” Knowing that luck would not strike twice, her parents packed lightly and cautiously made their way with Thea to her grandparents’ home nearby.

She says: “I was in my buggy and I saw men on their knees scrubbing the pavements. I thought, ‘Tomorrow these pavements will be very clean.’ Then I noticed the scrubbers were elderly Jewish men, with beards just like my grandfather’s, and some of the onlookers were laughing. I remember the laughing most, that was the worst.”

The family tried to apply for a visa to America where they had relatives. They were turned down as their sponsor did not earn enough to support them. Next they tried England – and got lucky. Many working people in the UK applied to give refuge to Jews fleeing Europe, even paying £50 – equivalent to £4,200 today – to sponsor families.

Thea could only pack a few books, clothes and her favourite doll, Lily. She says: “I only cried when I wasn’t allowed my teddy as he was too big. I still remember his eyes staring mournfully as I left.” Thea later bought every teddy she saw, and still keeps them piled on her dressing table. She says: “I felt I had to make up for my bear, the one I left behind. I really felt guilty about him.”

In London, Thea was traumatised again as Hitler’s Luftwaffe pounded the city for eight months in the Blitz, which began in September 1940. Sheltering in the Underground stations, she recalls the community spirit as Londoners sang songs and passed around food. She says: “My cousins and I walked up and down the tunnels and were asked where we’d come from. They were so sympathetic, they somehow knew we were Jewish refugees and wanted to know all about Hitler.”

One act of kindness stays with her. She says: “A woman stopped me and asked if I had a doll, and if she was alright. She was a doll renovator. She said she could make Lily healthy again. She gave her back after three days, completely made over. I couldn’t thank her enough. My doll, who’d been through that awful journey, being dumped here and there… that was the best thing I could have had.” Lily – a gift from her uncle Josef in Poland – is Thea’s one link to the family left behind and wiped out in the Holocaust.

Shortly after they fled, Josef was rounded up and put in a ghetto. As a doctor, he treated the Jewish residents and was allowed to leave to collect medicines. But one day he left without permission – and was shot dead in the street. Thea never found out what happened to her grandparents, aunts and other uncles. The likelihood is they were murdered in the Nazi camps.

She says: “I think about my father, who lost all his family. He never saw them again. He was interned on the Isle of Man during the war – like it wasn’t enough, all that he had suffered.”

Thea settled in London and married Bernard. They celebrated their 60th anniversary this year. As well as a son and a daughter, they have five grandchildren, whose pictures line the heaving bookshelves in her living room. She points to each, proudly outlining their achievements and hobbies. But Thea fears for them, as growing antisemitism risks a repeat of history. She says of keeping Holocaust memories alive: “I don’t want it to be just a chapter in a dusty history book. People should know and feel how it was for those who survived. I want it to be alive and vivid.”

She is a first-generation member of the Association of Jewish Refugees. Chief executive Michael Newman says: “Thea’s account underscores how society and humanity can crumble. Together with Holocaust survivors, the AJR is running our Leave the Light On initiative, encouraging the illumination of households on the night of November 9 to remember those whose lives were ripped apart.”