Letters
Remembering Kristallnacht
After the First World War the Allies dismembered the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Austria itself remained as a small country. Inhabitants of what had been the Austrian Empire had Austrian citizenship but were now considered citizens of the countries where they were born. Before the war, Germany and Austria had open borders with the result that many Jews had entered Germany to study, find jobs, or establish businesses, and had settled there. Many years later they discovered that they and their children were now Czechs, or Poles, or Italians, or whatever, but not Germans.
Toward the end of October 1938, an antisemitic Polish government passed a law to the effect that Polish citizens living outside of Poland, who had not been back to Poland for five years, would lose their Polish citizenship as of the first of November. That meant that many Polish Jews living in Germany would be stateless from then on. The Nazis weren’t thrilled at this prospect. They decided to forcibly deport all Jews with Polish citizenship and sent out orders to have them all rounded up.
The arrests of the Polish Jews took place on October 28, 1938. They were loaded onto waiting trucks and taken to designated collection points at railroad stations all over Germany. Special trains took them to the Polish border, and the crossing point into Poland was near the small village of Zbascyn.
Herschel Grynszpan was a young Jew who was studying in Paris then. His old, sick parents were among those arrested and sent to Poland. The thought of how they must have suffered made this young man insanely angry, and he shot Ernst vom Rath, a minor official at the German embassy in Paris, in revenge. Vom Rath lingered between life and death for a while, during which time the Nazis prepared their response.
It came on the night of November 9th, after he died, and it has ever since been known as “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass. Joseph Göbbels, the chief Nazi propagandist, explained its occurrence as a spontaneous expression of the “Kochende Volkseele” — the Seething National Soul. Of course it was not spontaneous but had been organized and directed from Berlin.
And you know the rest of the story…
Kristallnacht reached our immediate family with a rumbling, a shattering of glass. Terror. Not unlike the terror experienced at the epicenter of an earthquake – but with a difference. This earthquake does not destroy randomly. It is after you and your loved ones.
Morning arrived. Many windows were smashed and there was broken glass all over. Soon the sidewalk filled with neighbors throwing stones again. In front is my blond, curly-haired little playmate from an earlier day. Promptly he changes from an interested spectator into an eager participant.
The Kristallnacht was a giant step taken to separate the Jews of Germany from the fabric of German society. On the way to the ghetto, on the way to the gas chamber.
Norbert Ripp
Teaneck
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