NovEmma

Today and tomorrow is the 88th anniversary of Reichspogromnacht, (otherwise known as the November Pogrom or Kristallnacht): the state-sponsored, violent anti-Jewish pogrom across Nazi Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland on November 9-10, 1938. In just a few hours, 1,400 synagogues were desecrated and set alight. Torah scrolls were torched. Over 7,000 Jewish shops and businesses were vandalized and looted. Jews were viciously attacked and publicly humiliated. 91 Jews were murdered and 30,000 Jewish men were summarily rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Modern analysis by German scholars estimate that when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment, murders, and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll from Reichspogromnacht reaches the hundreds. Perhaps most significantly, Reichspogromnacht is regarded as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Shoah. It marked a critical shift in Nazi anti-Jewish policy from discrimination and segregation to open, state-led violence and persecution. When I think of Reichspogromnacht, I think of this quote: ‘That was the heart of the problem of German Jewry: It was so much a part of German society that the Nazi blow hit it from within. Until 1938 my parents never thought of leaving Germany. “There's no way the Germans we live with will continue to do these things. It's only an episode.’ That was the atmosphere. It was also the atmosphere on Kristallnacht. They couldn't comprehend it. It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying...I remember her phone her gentile friends — she had more gentile friends than Jewish friends — No answer. No one answered her.’ Excerpt from the testimony of historian and Shoah survivor Prof. Zvi. Bacharach, who was ten years old when the events of Reichspogromnacht unfolded in Hanau, Germany. No one answered her. There is no more to be said than this. Photo from Yad Vashem of the interior of a destroyed synagogue in Koenigsbach, Germany, November 10, 1938.