On November 9th, we began the annual commemoration of the start of the Shoah and indeed the start of what many historians regard as the beginning of World War II. Kristallnacht. The “Night of Broken Glass” across Nazi Germany. That event — in various guises and manifestations — keeps being repeated. Especially today.
Though the persecution of Jews began in the months and years immediately following Hitler’s ascension to power on January 30, 1933 — including the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and the construction of the first concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald — this is the date of the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution. On November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi pogrom against the Jews of Germany resulted in the burning of some 150 synagogues, the destruction of thousands of Jewish-owned homes and businesses and the murder and maiming of over 10,000 Jews.
In this 81st year since the end of World War II, Kristallnacht reminds us that we need to be vigilant in our resolve that unspeakably evil events that require unfathomable pain to repulse, never occur again. Soldiers’ courage must always be accompanied by an engaged citizenry conscious of the responsibilities of freedom. A citizenry that is aware of the fragility of liberty. Kristallnacht occurred only because of the complicity of the “Good Germans” who sat by in silence. Jewish blood was on their hands too as much as the Brownshirts and SS killers who carried out the butchery.
The parallels are clear. Just as today’s theocratic tyrannies and their proxies unleash mayhem on the family of free nations, so too do we still witness state-sponsored lies and terror against Jews and Israel, the latter being the frontline nation in the West’s existential battle against today’s new “ism.” The rise of antisemitism is the result. But what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.
Islamism has replaced Nazism. And with the UN’s General Assembly and its other bodies like the Human Rights Council controlled by dictators and despots, the need for an informed and involved commonweal of free people is greater than ever. World War II and the Cold War may be over, but the tactic that incited and sustained the enemies of freedom then—the tactic of the Big Lie—is still very much in evidence and in use today.
That tactic fictionalizes history, perverts truth, radicalizes many to terror and nullifies the innocent. All is not right in this world. Let us never forget that Kristallnacht did not start with bullets but with words.
The sonorous drumbeat of history goes on. And the antidote to the acts of antisemitic violence, the screeds of hate, of exclusiveness, of nullification is not more law. It is enforcement of the laws we have. But it is also individual vigilance. Individual responsibility. Individual service and sacrifice to defend the just, promote the truth and eradicate evil. Against all odds, a vigilance that – in Churchill’s words – will never give in!
The words of hate against Jews today are not more nuanced, nor more subtle than were those in 1930s Germany. The words today are clothed in perverted legalisms and distortions of history, and are just as deadly in their impact today as they were then. Does mankind learn? It is increasingly evident that it does not. What can be said is that despite mankind’s fleeting encounters with courage and conscience, the pendulum of history seems to rest too long — and in too many places — in the shattered glass-strewn streets of the Germany of 88 years ago.
One yearns that the appeasers and the cowards and the haters will be vanquished. But we can never be sure of that. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of basking in freedom’s glow without remembering tyranny’s shadow. For that is our only surety that Kristallnacht — which is not yet over — will not be a metaphor for all time.
Photo: The Night of the Broken Glass. Courtesy The Jerusalem Post
