My father is 96 years old and grew up in Nazi Germany in a small town called Bautzen. I did several hours of interviews with him about his experiences growing up, which I am turning into a book. This is what he said about Kristallnacht:

"I remember Kristallnacht. I was 11 years old. You heard that on this street a house burned down or that there are rambunctious people coming. There may have been five buildings vandalized in Bautzen. I saw a house with some damage, mainly windows broken. People were going in and out of the house. It did not seem significant at the time. They didn’t even talk about Kristallnacht in the paper. It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews. There was no specific graffiti on those vandalized houses. In a small town like Bautzen, there wasn’t much of a Kristallnacht but when you went to bigger cities there probably was. But I didn’t know about it at the time. I only realized the magnitude of it after the war.

What was more noticeable was Nazi propaganda. There were banners that read something like, “Jews are our misfortune.” There were signs on almost all shops indicating whether they were Jewish or not. Most of them were not Jewish. This was a big thing!"