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Holocaust survivor George Shefi gestures as he enters the courtyard of his former home, where he witnessed Kristallnacht, in Berlin, Germany, November 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

BERLIN (AP) — George Shefi was just 6 years old on November 9, 1938, when his mother kept him home for three days.

When he was finally allowed to go out again, his Jewish school inside a Berlin synagogue had been burned down, the Jewish hat store opposite his home had been looted, and the windows of the stationery shop next door had been smashed.

The Jewish shop owner “was trying to clean this thing up, and there were, I don’t know, a lot of people, 30, 40, 50, or something, jeering and yelling and saying nasty things,” Shefi recalled during a recent visit to his childhood home in Berlin’s Schoeneberg district.

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Promoted: American Technion Society

Shefi, now 94 and a resident of Jerusalem, was describing Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis, among them many…