Oral history roundtable interview with members of the Kristallnacht Commemoration conducted by Barbara Tabach on March 17, 2015 for the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Esther Toporek Finder, Raymonde Fiol, Alexander Kuechel, Philipp Meinecke, and Rabbi Felipe Goodman discuss the importance of remembering the Holocaust, the Kristallnacht event and why they participated in the commemoration event hosted at Temple Beth Sholom.
In this interview, the participants discuss their experiences during Kristallnacht, and the commemoration events in southern Nevada with Holocaust survivors and their families. Mr. Kuechel recounts his journey through concentration camps and being liberated by the Russians. Rabbi Goodman talks about meeting Mr. Meinecke, whose grandfather was a high-ranking SS officer. Meinecke discusses his upbringing in Germany and trying to learn about his family's involvement in the Holocaust, and the hope he felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall as Jews returned to Germany. The group discusses the importance of Holocaust education because there are still so many untold stories.
On November 9th to November 10th, 1938, in an incident known as Kristallnacht, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and killed close to one hundred Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, also called the Night of Broken Glass, some thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. German Jews had been subjected to repressive policies since 1933 when Nazi Party leader Adolph Hitler became chancellor of Germany. However, prior to Kristallnacht these Nazi policies had been primarily nonviolent. However, after Kristallnacht conditions for German Jews grew increasingly worse. During World War II, Hitler and the Nazis implemented their so-called final solution to what they referred to as "the Jewish problem" and carried out the systematic murder of some six million European Jews in what is now commonly known as the Holocaust.
Raymonde "Ray" Fiol was born August 22, 1936 in Germany. A Jewish Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in Auschwitz, Fiol was hidden by a Christian family of Resistance fighters during her childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris, France. She married American serviceman Phil Fiol and left Paris in 1957. The couple lived in New York City, New York where she worked in inventory control. Fiol retired to Las Vegas, Nevada around 2003 and became active in the local Holocaust Survivors Group.
The Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada records (1965, 1972, 1999-2016) mainly consist of organizational records created by the board of directors and officers of the group, stories about the experiences of local Holocaust survivors, and ephemera related to the Holocaust Survivors Group and the local Jewish community. Organization records include meeting minutes, correspondence, by-laws, and a list of officers. Materials also include a video recording of a 2006 Yom Hashoah memorial service to remember the Holocaust at Temple Beth Sholom and the Spring 2016 issue of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.