BERLIN (AFP)--- For Steffi Pinkus the first memory of the Nazi pogrom ‘Kristallnacht’, 70 years ago this week, is her uncle's panicked voice as he learned the noose was tightening around the necks of Germany's Jews.
The 84-year-old Pinkus, then named Lewin, was 14 at the time and had already experienced the jarring upheaval and petty humiliations that Jews routinely suffered under Hitler's "Third Reich".
But in the course of November 9-10, 1938, Pinkus recalls the beginning of a terrifying downward spiral for her family -- memories that still visit her in her sleep in her adopted hometown an ocean away, Chicago.
As the 70th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass, known as Kristallnacht will be commemorated, Pinkus's experience bridges those darkest of days and what she calls the exemplary Holocaust remembrance work in today's Germany.
Pinkus related some of those experiences in lengthy email exchanges, taken down by her daughter Evelyne, with an AFP reporter after their first meeting in Berlin in July 2007, at a small ceremony in honour of her murdered relatives.
"My mother woke up on the morning after the Kristallnacht to find her uncle on the phone with a Professor Ehrlich," Evelyne said.
"Something was being discussed which at first she didn't understand. Then it became clear that something terrible had happened. Her uncle told her that the synagogues had been burned down and that Jewish men under age 55 had been taken into custody."
Kristallnacht, which was a prelude to the Holocaust, in which six million European Jews were systematically exterminated during WWII, saw Nazi thugs torch more than 200 synagogues, rampage against Jewish business and round up Jewish men to deport them to concentration camps.
Steffi had already been forced to leave her parents in Cottbus, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) southeast of Berlin, to live with her well-to-do aunt and uncle in the capital, after Nazi race laws led to her expulsion from school.
'That day she smoked her first cigarette'
"She was very worried about her father, but no contact was possible as the home phone in Cottbus was shut off," she said.
"She then took the usual route to school by street car and she saw very long lines at the post offices, where women were waiting to send telegrams.
The women on line, she imagines, were Jewish -- their men had either been arrested or were in hiding."
Steffi Pinkus said it had been particularly chilling that apart from the terrorised Jewish community which saw the writing on the wall, life in Berlin went on as usual.
"The atmosphere in the Jewish school was very different of course. No classes that day. Everyone was too nervous, they just talked all day. It was whispered to her that two young Jewish men where being hidden in the building," she said.
"That day she smoked her first cigarette," Evelyne said of her mother. "The next day, her mother arrived in Berlin to announce that my mother's father -- my grandfather -- had been arrested by the police in Cottbus and taken to prison."
After one week in custody, Steffi's father Alexius Lewin was deported with other Jewish men to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp north of Berlin.
He was eventually released and escaped the country for England in February 1939, followed by his wife Bertha and 15-year-old Steffi a month later.
Steffi never again saw her beloved Uncle Heinrich and Aunt Else, with whom she had lived during her last agonising months in Nazi Germany.
Heinrich died at Theresienstadt concentration camp in today's Czech Republic. Else was murdered at Auschwitz.
Despite the crushing weight of their family's past, Pinkus and her daughter Evelyne, 52, now spend a part of each year in Berlin and have become deeply involved in a unique memorial project for Holocaust victims.
"Stolpersteine" -- literally "stumbling blocks" -- was started by Cologne sculptor Gunther Demnig in 1996, at first illegally but gathering pace since 2000 with the approval of the German authorities.
'My mother suffers from survivor's guilt'
Stolpersteine are small plaques the size of a child's hand fitted into the ground before the former homes of Holocaust victims.
Each contains a short, stark biography of the key dates of the person's life and death to the extent they are available from local records.
Evelyne Pinkus has had two Stolpersteine laid in honour of Heinrich and Else Lewin as well as a cousin of Steffi, Frieda Braun.
Germans now living in the apartment buildings from which her ancestors were deported attended the inauguration ceremonies, some of them bearing flowers for the dead, while high school students read essays about Jewish life in the neighbourhood in the 1930s.
Evelyne said that gesture had helped her and her mother cope with the enormous burden of their family's fate.
"My mother obviously suffers from survivor's guilt," she said.
"These ceremonies made the load a bit easier to handle. No words can describe how we felt."
For many, the Stolpersteine are more effective than the huge and impersonal Holocaust memorial in central Berlin at bringing home history's human toll.
But the project is not without its critics and a new documentary due to hit German cinemas this week covers the history of the initiative, which has now seen some 17,000 stones laid in Germany and other European countries.
"Stolpersteine" the film spotlights a controversy in the southern city of Munich in which the mayor and Charlotte Knobloch, the leader of both the local and national Jewish community, have effectively barred the memorial stones.
They argue that the stones' placement in the pavement invites passers-by to tread on them, desecrating the victims' memory once more.
But for the Pinkuses, the Stolpersteine keep the memories of their relatives alive.
"They are important because they are a reminder for whoever sees them of the terrible fates these individuals suffered, and that we must do everything in our power to prevent these injustices from happening ever again," Evelyne said.