Kristallnacht such a musical, almost poetic, word.
Translated literally from the German, it means the night of glass.
Understood figuratively, in the lexicon of those who remember it only too well, it means night of broken glass.
There was nothing poetic or pleasant about the real Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 exactly 70 years ago on Sunday. That night witnessed a nightmare that was only too real, the beginning of seven years of genocide and unspeakable suffering that left six million Jews, and as many gentiles of varying nationalities, dead at the hands of Nazi Germany and their collaborators, too numerous to mention.
Kristallnacht, the infamous night when the sound of the shattering windows of synagogues, Jewish homes and storefronts was heard throughout Germany, has come to be regarded as a powerful symbol of the Holocaust which followed in its violent wake.
As such, it must never be forgotten, not this Sunday; not on Nov. 9, 2038, when a century will have passed; and not for a long, long time thereafter.
Through such commemorations, Jews and others may honor the memory of those who perished so unjustly in the madness and evil of the Holocaust. Tears may be shed for those innocents, and prayers uttered, by those who knew and loved them, even by those who did not.
And we can do much more than this.
We can use the enduring image of Kristallnacht to keep in our collective consciousness the sobering reality of what human beings are truly capable of and thereby it is to be fervently hoped find ways to combat those darkest of human instincts.
For 70 long years later the racism, the anti-Semitism, the paranoia and the power-lust that drove Adolf Hitler and his regimented thugs have not passed from the scene. To know this, one need merely listen to the speeches made by the Iranian president, to read the manifestos and proclamations of terrorist chieftains around the world, to hear the cries of women and children in the Darfurian refugee camps.
Seventy years is a long time. The glass from the broken windows of Kristallnacht has long ago been swept up and carted away, as has the rubble from the cataclysmic war that followed. But if one listens carefully, the sound of broken glass can still be heard, sometimes less clamorous, perhaps, and in other places and by new generations but unmistakable all the same.
We must never allow ourselves to grow deaf to that sound, and everything it implies.
