Stand Firm by Timothy Fountain

Broken glass

 

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From Israel’s Yad Vashem* Holocaust Memorial, where there is a powerful exhibition about a November night 75 years ago,

On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a series of riots against the Jews in Germany and Austria. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes were damaged or destroyed. For the first time, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish.  This event came to be called Kristallnacht (“Night of the Broken Glass”) for the shattered store windowpanes that carpeted German streets. Kristallnacht was an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, and a significant event in Holocaust history.

Germany’s Der Spiegel (“The Mirror,” ironic on the anniversary of “broken glass”) shares a recent survey of 6,000 Jews living in current European Union nations.  It’s in German, but if you use Google Chrome there’s a translator function that will give you a few hilarious renderings but also the main points in English. Among the findings,
- Half report that someone had denied or minimized the Holocaust in their presence
- Almost half had been confronted with the assertion that “Israel treats the Palestinians as badly as Nazis treated the Jews.”
But we need not cast a rueful look toward Europe.  Sharing about Kristallnacht on Facebook, I wrote,

75 years - within your lifetime or that of your parents or grandparents. Not in some “primitive” country but in nations with representative government and a long history of science, philosophy, art and Christianity. They were mired in economic depression and humiliated by the outcomes of WWI - we all need to be wary of how easily our hardships and sense of victimization can have us listening to the great leader who claims to fix it all for us. Watch out for scapegoating of particular races, for blame games, for mind numbing decadence (remember “Cabaret”), for single party political power and for groups or leaders not bound by Constitutional checks and balances. Oh, wait…

* Literally “A hand and a name.”  Hand was a euphemism for monument.  It is from Isaiah 56:5, “I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”