Episode 2 – Lullaby 1933

by Miriam Oles and Rabbi Judy Schindler

Eliezer Schindler was well aware of the threat Hitler posed. He had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925) and was familiar with Hitler’s political manifesto characterized by rabid antisemitism. In January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, Eliezer became distraught. In March 1933, when the first concentration camp, Dachau, was set up to detain political opponents, Eliezer was despairing. Many of his counterparts were being arrested and imprisoned. When the March 23 Enabling Act was passed allowing the Nazi led government to issues laws without the consent of Germany’s parliament, Eliezer solidified his plans to emigrate leaving his family behind. This poem, Lullaby 1933, was on of the last two poems we have before he forever left his home of Munich.

Photo by Terence Burke from Unsplash.com