Seventy-five since Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi stormtroopers and ordinary Germans rampaged throughout the Third Reich, spray-painting shop windows with hateful anti-Semitic slogans, shattering Jewish-owned shopfronts and burning synagogues to the ground. Hardly anyone is left who experienced and remembers that fateful night, when German Jews could no longer delude themselves about their safety.
So now it’s up to us to remember, and commemorate. And it’s more important than ever. As survivors pass on, the Holocaust becomes easier for people to deny or simply ignore. Efforts like the Shoah Foundation, spoken about at last month’s Fred Marcus lecture, go a long way in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but remembrance requires the active participation of each and every one of us.
{Magdeburg, Germany, the morning after Kristallnacht. Most disturbing about this photo are the two people in the left foreground, smiling. © Wikipedia}
Because, sadly, anti-Semitism lives on. A disturbing program broadcast on German television late in October revealed that latent anti-Semitism is alive and well in Germany, a country which has arguably done the most (aside from Israel of course) in terms of Holocaust education. [The program is in German; the Jerusalem Post described the documentary in this English-language article.]
This Sunday, November 10, the Yizkor Project is hosting a community-wide gathering commemorating the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The event will include a screening of “Night of Broken Glass”, a documentary debunking the Nazi propaganda that the event was ‘spontaneous’ and shows how the destructive pogrom was the climax of a five-year campaign of institutional and state-induced anti-Semitism. We urge you all to attend.
Kristallnacht previously on Rocky Mountain Jew:
- Remembering Kristallnacht…73 years later
- Links to…Kristallnacht
- Destruction and rebirth in East Germany
- Kristallnacht — the importance of remembrance
Kristallnacht elsewhere in this week’s IJN:
Never Again.