A guest post by JS:
[Edits in red]
For Jews living in the security of America, it is hard to imagine the breadth and scope of Kristalnacht ("Crystal Night") 70 years later. On November 9-10, 1938, in coordinated pogroms across the entirety of Germany-Austria 91 Jews were murdered, approximately 30,000 were sent to concentration camps, 267 synagogues were burned and 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked (details of the instructions given out for Kristalnacht can be found here).
I tried to put together some numbers comparing Jewish populations of Germany 1938 to America 2008. Obviously, these things don't scale perfectly, but sometimes it is a useful tool for getting a sense of the magnitude of the event. At the time of Kristalnacht, there were more than 560,000 Jews living in Germany, roughly 0.76% of the population. According to the latest large-scale study performed by the American Jewish Yearbook Population Survey in 2006 there were 6.4 million Jews in America, 2.1% of the population. A 2002 study found about 3,700 synagogues in America. In Germany, in 1930 there were about 1,400 synagogues.
If the events had occurred in America, approximately 1,040 people would have been killed, 343,000 people would have been rounded up into concentration camps, and 705 synagogues would be burned over the span of two days. And of course, this would just be the beginning.
The events of Kristalnacht were perpetrated in response to German junior diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, being shot to death by a 17 year old German Jew named Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. Grynszpan's parents had been expelled from Germany amongst 12,000 other Jews nearly a month earlier on October 18, 1938. Grynszpan was in Paris when this occurred and heard about the events from his sister and from a detailed account in a Yiddish paper. To avenge the event, Grynszpan walked to the German embassy in Paris and killed vom Rath.
It should be obvious that naming this as the cause of Kristalnacht is much like saying WWI was caused by the killing of Archduke Ferdinand. The events were a pretense and recent evidence has revealed that plans for Auschwitz existed at least as early as 3 years after Kristalnacht in 1941 which is roughly 1 year earlier than historians previously believed formal plans existed (see here; however, see here for an international expert's refutation of this new evidence).
70 years later the question becomes: now what? It is nice to have slogans such as "never forgive, never forget" but it really isn't anything more than a slogan. Forgiveness has happened long ago: the Jewish population of Germany is on the rise, Israel often calls Germany it's greatest friend in Europe, the Knesset has been addressed repeatedly by German dignitaries in German, and the list goes on. Forgetting happens every day as we lose more and more witnesses to the events of the Holocaust and every day that we hear about neo-Nazism on the rise, anti-Semitic attacks on our brethren and our institutions and with the threat of terrorism in Israel and threats from Israel's Arab neighbors.
As someone whose grandparents survived the Holocaust and grew up hearing their stories, I find these trends of forgiving and forgetting deeply disturbing. And I think all Jews should as well. But, what I find more disturbing is the seeming impossibility of taking away useful lessons from the events of Kristalnacht and the Holocaust. I'm not sure we today would be any smarter or more perceptive in recognizing impending danger before it happens and preventing it. Obviously we need to be vigilent, but foresight is never as clear as hindsight, and we need to be prepared that such events can, and if history has anything to say about it, very well might happen again in the future.
But, rather than feel hopeless, I think we should feel empowered. More than anything, the Holocaust proves and should teach us that not only are we here to stay, but we are remarkably resilient. Nothing can stop us. In the 60+ years since the end of the Holocaust we have founded a country on land that lay dormant for hundreds of years and transformed it into a powerhouse. We took a nearly dead language and brought it into the 21st century with millions of native speakers. And we did it all under constant anti-semitism, wars and attacks.
Thus, for me, looking back 70 years on Kristalnacht I mourn all those who were killed and I pray that their memories are not lost from this earth. But I also celebrate our phoenix-like rise from the ashes and I am confident that the Jewish people are made of sterner stuff than any enemy that may arise.
Some more links:
See Yad VaShem's page on Kristalnacht here and here.
Some NY Times headlines (for some of the links, you must pay to see the full article): here, here, here, and here.
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Buy DB's book. (please)
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