Margaretville senior is helped to go home to Germany for a reunion

Kristallnacht came on the night of November 9, 1938. All over Germany, Nazis burned synagogues and smashed the windows of Jewish shops. Auran’s house was on the edge of town, so his family didn’t know what was happening. At 6 a.m., a policeman rang the doorbell. Auran’s father had a pistol left over from World War I, so he threw it into the garden so the man in the long black leather coat would not find it. When the policeman asked about the box it had been stored in, now sprinkled with an accumulation of small items, his father claimed to use it for holding paper clips. He was arrested, along with the other Jewish men over 21.

The next day, Auran’s mother went to Frankfurt, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) had an office. They were arranging a Kinderzug — a children’s train — to transport Jewish children out of Germany. The war had not yet begun. In the fall of 1939, Auran went to eastern Germany to say good-bye to his grandmother, who was eventually sent to Auschwitz. On his way home, he saw German troops marching in the other direction, heading for the invasion of Poland. Ten days later, he was on the Kinderzug.

“I was fortunate to end up in England,” said Auran. “Those who went to Belgium and Holland were all caught and killed.” He remembers a border guard, on the crossing from Germany to Holland, trying to frighten him. “He looked at my papers and said, ‘Have you paid your taxes?’ I refused to be intimidated. He finally gave up. After we crossed the border, a gigantic cheer went up.”

A ferry from Holland brought Auran to Harwich, England, where a family friend met him. He spent a day or two seeing the sights of London and then was taken to Taplow, a boarding school 20 miles from the city. “I immediately liked England,” he recalled. “They played games in school — what a revelation that was! I played rugby. I was eleven and three-quarters.”

At this point, he didn’t know much English beyond “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t understand.” When his schoolmates taught him four-letter words to say to the teachers, most of the teachers realized he was the victim of a prank. “But one of them was on old fart,” related Auran. “When I told him to go fuck himself, he caned my hand. After class, I beat the hell out of the kid who had played the trick on me. I gave him two black eyes and broke his nose.”

He was called to the headmaster’s office, located in an ancient mansion. “The headmaster strode up and down the ballroom, saying, ‘It isn’t done!’ But he recognized what had happened. After that, no one gave me any false words. Also after that, I began to calm down.”

In 1944, when Auran was almost 17, he was sent to the U.S. His parents, hiring themselves out as a cook and a butler, had made it to Los Angeles, where they were working for movie star Paul Muni. They had stayed in touch with their son by mail, numbering the letters so he would know if a letter had gone astray. He went to California to meet them and enrolled in classes at UCLA. He was not happy there, finding the university huge and impersonal.

That summer, a friend invited him to work in Alaska packing fish. “Don’t do it!” Auran warned. “God, it stank! You burned all your clothes when you came back. But I was well paid.”

On the way back to California, he stopped in Seattle, where he discovered there was a school of journalism at the University of Washington. He promptly transferred.

Over the years, he has worked at newspapers in Nebraska, Alaska, and New Hampshire, and he has written two books on skiing. As a writer for Ski Magazine, he returned to Germany in 1967 to cover the first World Cup. He took a side trip to Aschaffenburg and found that most of the old buildings had been destroyed and replaced. He blames the mayor who decided, in the waning days of World War II, to make a stand for Hitler, resulting in the bombing of the town.

In the sixties, Auran married his wife, Barbara, who has since passed away. They were married for 43 years and adopted two children.

This year’s expedition was Auran’s first trip back to Aschaffenburg since 1967. There are no Jews left in the town, so the synagogue was never rebuilt, but on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a memorial ceremony is held, and the former Jewish residents are invited back. “They treated us like kings,” Auran said.

At the ceremony of remembrance, he said, “They gave each one of us a candle, and we had to put them where the synagogue used to be. When all the candles were lit, it was very impressive.”

He and his old schoolmates discussed their childhood. “One of the people on the trip was a friend of mine. He said, ‘You stole my girlfriend!’ I didn’t know she was his girlfriend — she was just one more girl.”

The next reunion will be in 2018. Auran hopes he will be able to attend.