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November 6, 2008
Exclusive: Reflections on Kristallnacht
In late October of 1938, 20,000 Jewish residents of Germany who were of Polish origin were rousted in the middle of the night and deported to Poland. However, Poland declared them non-citizens and closed the borders. The Jews, men, women and children, were finally herded to a border town and they remained there stranded in abominable conditions. Most of them were subsequently sent to the Warsaw Ghetto.
In Paris, a 17-year-old boy, Hershel Grynspan, the child of a couple among those dislocated and suffering Jews, received a note from his desperate family detailing the suffering and anguish of the group. On November 7th, enraged and helpless, living a life which he later described as worse than a dog’s, he took a pistol to the German embassy and shot to death an official named Ernst Von Rath.
Two days later, Germany erupted into an evening of vandalism and brutality which lasted for almost 24 hours. When it subsided, nearly 200 synagogues were burned, 815 Jewish-owned shops were demolished, warehouses and homes were set on fire and 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps.
There were some, even among Jews, who thought this pogrom was occasioned by Von Rath’s murder. In fact, the plans for “the night of shattered glass” were conceived several months earlier as a warning to the Jews.
Many years later, a friend of my parents who lived through that night described the events of the next day in Berlin. He was a physician, a “dozent” professor, a disciple of Roentgen, and well respected in the academy. The picture of the perfect Teuton, he affected the closely shaven head of the Germans and had a “messerschnit” – a fencing scar on his cheek. He was convinced that at the university, in his mind the bastion of liberal thought and the pursuit of truth and justice, he would be welcomed by commiserating colleagues appalled by this violent national tantrum.
When he arrived at the University, his colleagues turned their backs on him, the students jeered and he was summarily dismissed. He was fortunate to leave Germany on one of the last ships from Hamburg.
On the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht I attended a memorial and screening of a documentary on The Night of Shattered Glass. The late Cardinal O’Connor attended in spite of a high fever. He had, for many years, placed a memorial candle on the window of the residence in St. Patrick’s Cathedral to remind passersby of the terrible events of that night. The frail Cardinal, calling himself a “fellow Semite,” said that for him that particular evening was extremely important. Even though many worse events were to take place, Kristallnacht was the warning that should have been heeded by the civilized world.
Nonetheless, the “civilized world” went about its business. In America and Canada the authorities were tightening immigration laws against Europe’s Jews. In England, where the infamous Munich Pact was signed only eight weeks earlier on September 29th, the gates of Palestine, slated by British law to be the safe harbor for the world’s Jews, clamped shut, trapping millions of European Jews. In Russia where millions of Jews lived a miserable existence, a non-aggression pact with Hitler had been signed in August 1938. Most painful of all, the Evian conference of July 6th, 1938 found no takers for any sizeable number of Jewish refugees among the Western nations, with the exception of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. (Unfortunately, due to the rapid escalation of the war against the Jews, only 900 Jews actually got there.)
I am always obsessed with these events. I ask myself: How would Kristallnacht be covered by the media today? Outrage? Perhaps, but the “root cause” theorists would soon bring up the murder of Rath, even though these events were already on course long before Grynspan’s fateful visit to the embassy. After all, the apologists for the murderous sprees now known as the “Intifada,” which have claimed the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, routinely blame it on the “occupation” by Israel rather than on the enduring blood lust known as Jihad.
And, what of the academies today? They should be bastions of liberal thought and the pursuit of justice and truth. Are they? Melanie Phillips has described England’s “descent into madness” as its academics boycott and viciously malign Israel. Here in America, American patriots and defenders of Israel are a shrinking and increasingly shirking minority as universities invite and lionize and give tenure to terrorists and their enablers and assorted crackpot “historians” who weave their bias into curriculum.
Mainline churches here and in England parrot the Arab line and promote divestment, the code word for economic sanctions against Israel. Even modern day blood libels such as the Al-Dura scandal are given a wide and credulous audience while Sharia law creeps silently but steadily into all society’s infrastructures.
And what about entertainment and the media? They continually spout moral equivalence between monsters and victims. Everyone has a legitimate “grievance” and the most fashionable “grievance” of all is that of Israel’s Arab enemies.
The mainline newspapers – even those in states like Great Britain, Holland and France – all directly threatened with Jihad, do not lessen their daily anti-Israel screeds.
Again, I dwell on the harbingers of Kristallnacht. Something is happening now. There is a war within a war. While the entire Western world and our civilization are threatened by Islam and Jihad, the war against Israel strengthens. By now, one might think that only a person living on Mars would fail to see the trajectory between systematic delegitimation of Israel and overt anti-Semitism. Only pachyderms do not feel the sting and continue to show their disdain for the “occupation,” feeding the enemy that would consume them.
Israel is the most threatened nation in the world. How ironic and baffling it is that America’s best ally in the escalating war against Islamic terrorism is in danger of being abandoned by its faint hearted supporters.
Are we descending into a night of shattered hope?
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth S. King is a freelance writer who writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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