Herschel Grynszpan - Hanover To Paris

Hanover To Paris

Herschel attended a state primary school until he was 14, in 1935. He later said that he left school because Jewish students were already facing discrimination. He was an intelligent, sensitive youth who had few close friends, although he was an active member of the Jewish youth sports club, Bar-Kochba Hanover. When he left school, his parents decided there was no future for him in Germany, and tried to arrange for him to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. With financial assistance from the Hanover Jewish community, Herschel was sent to a yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) in Frankfurt, where he studied Hebrew and the Torah: he was by all accounts more religious than his parents. After eleven months he left the yeshiva and returned to Hanover, where he applied to emigrate to Palestine. But the local Palestine emigration office told him he was too young, and would have to wait a year.

Rather than wait, Herschel and his parents decided that he should go to live with his uncle and aunt, Abraham and Chawa Grynszpan, in Paris. He obtained a Polish passport and a German residence permit, and received permission to leave Germany for Belgium, where another uncle, Wolf Grynszpan, was living. He had no intention of staying in Belgium, however, and in September 1936 he entered France illegally. He was unable to enter France legally because he had no visible means of support, while Jews were not permitted to take money out of Germany.

In Paris, Grynszpan lived in a small Yiddish-speaking enclave of Polish Orthodox Jews, and met few people outside it, learning only a few words of French in two years. He spent this period trying to get legal residence in France, without which he could not work or study legally, but was rejected by French officials. His re-entry permit for Germany expired in April 1937 and his Polish passport expired in January 1938, leaving him without legal papers.

In July 1937, the Prefecture of Police ruled that Grynszpan had no basis for his request to stay in France, and in August he was ordered to leave the country. He had no re-entry permit for Germany and in any case had no desire to go there. In March 1938, Poland had passed a law depriving Polish citizens who had lived continuously abroad for more than five years of their citizenship: therefore effectively becoming a stateless person he continued to live in Paris illegally. He was active in Jewish émigré circles and was a member of the Bundist youth movement Tsukunft.