AN IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY

November 10, 2023.  

Today is the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the so-called night of the broken glass, the night in which the latent antisemitism of the Nazi era erupted across Germany and Austria,  heralding the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people - the Holocaust - the extermination of six million innocent souls. This number – impressive as it is – says nothing about the intergenerational trauma of this unspeakable human travesty.

I grew up with my mother’s eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht and her family’s plight, a heartbreaking and traumatizing story. It happened before I was born, but I imbibed its horrors eight years later, in my mother’s milk.

My mother, Fritzl, a precocious fifteen year-old at the time of Kristallnacht, and her brothers – Ernst age ten and Walter age six - lived with their parents, Samuel and Esther, in Graz, Austria.

“We lived in a beautiful apartment with a spiral staircase, paintings and antiques. From the window on the second floor we could see the main street. Papa taught us about Afghanistan and Esperanto. He believed strongly in internationalism, sharing one language and a common culture. He was Jewish but completely secular. He owned a few clothing stores. He rode between the stores on his Harley Davidson, always dressed in a suit and tie. Everything was normal. I went to school and never experienced any antisemitism. Imagine our shock when one day a relative arrived from another town with a bandaged head and warned us of the pogrom against the Jews.  Papa scoffed. ‘They’ll leave us alone.  I fought for Germany in WW1. I have medals for bravery!’ But Papa was wrong. We heard the crash of soldiers boots as they marched in the street outside, and in a few days, the Gestapo arrested Papa. They sent him to Dachau….”

The story went on from there, as I said, a story of great tragedy and loss. I was born the year after the war in 1946. Mom was still traumatized about the events of November,1938. Today - November 10th, 2023 - is a solemn day, more solemn for me than previous anniversaries of this day - a day of contemplation, a day in which to consider the meaning of the slogan “NEVER AGAIN,” especially since we are living in the present time through the grim realities of a merciless war between Israel and Hamas whose sworn purpose is the extermination of Israel and Jews, and as we witness a historic rise in antisemitism in America and around the world.