Video #2

...and there will be more...

Have we forgotten?

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass. It was the Nazi's first widespread pogrom of physical aggression against the Jewish people in Germany and its occupied lands. If you want details about how and why it happened, the USHMM website is a marvelous resource.

The government sanctioned the action. People were beaten, arrested, and killed. Synagogues were burned, Torahs were desecrated, businesses were destroyed. Lives were shattered. After Kristallnacht, no one could doubt the Nazi's intentions toward the Jewish people.

In researching my (soon-to-be-released, I promise!) novel, The Path Divided, I interviewed a Jewish woman who lived in Munich in 1938. Her memories of that day are so vivid, I'll just paste them here.

"It happened to be the Yahrzeit of my father’s Mum, I think, so he went to the synagogue that morning. It was actually a little prayer hall as the Nazis had previously destroyed our big synagogue.Someone phoned our flat early on 9 November and told my Mum (who never found out who it was that called) to get out of Munich - they were arresting all Jewish males. My mother told my brother and me not to go to school/college that day and we would find our Dad at the synagogue. But when we got there in our little Opel Olympia car, we saw an SS man standing guard.

"My mum had got out of the car well before we got there and my brother and I saw her talk to this SS chap and then walk away in the opposite direction of the car. My brother, aged 17 who’d never had a driving lesson, bravely drove slowly along the pavement till we caught up with my Mum who indicated that he should drive round the next corner. He did, my Mum got in and, just on the off-chance of finding my Dad in his office, we drove there.

"We saw the shattered glass of Jewish shop windows as we parked the car. My Mum went up and we waited, then my brother went up and after a while they came down. My brother went to his college, my Dad had a valid passport on him and went to his sister in Luxemburg and my Mum and I went to my grandmother’s house.

"My brother came there a bit later as he realised it wasn’t safe for him at his college.

"I never went back to school until I got to England in 1939."

I asked her about the mood in her neighborhood in the days after Kristallnacht. 

"Incredulity and embarrassment on the part of our non-Jewish friends and neighbours. But also a sort of passive acceptance of what the Nazis did."

As the recent shooting in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue shows, antisemitism still exists. My prayer this day is that we NEVER passively accept aggression against ANY group of people.

We must stand against any government or ideology that tries to divide us into US vs THEM. 

WE MUST NEVER FORGET. 

Elderly man sets out to clean each of the 388 Holocaust memorial plaques in his city

Starting a decade ago, over a dozen European nations installed bronze 'stumbling blocks' on city streets. Each block holds a small plaque inscribed with the name, birth year, and other information of victims of the Nazis. In most cases, the blocks were installed in front of the individual's last known residence.

Dirt and grime have built up on the plaques of course. Salzburg, Austria resident Gerhard Geier thought the people memorialized on his city's streets deserved better. The 79-year-old Geier made it his year's goal to personally clean each plaque on Salzburg's 388 stumbling blocks. Why this year? To mark the darkness of the 80th anniversary of Germany's annexation of Austria with a note of humanity.

So Geier sets out armed with a footstool and cleaning supplies. He cleans each five-inch square plaque by hand, rinses it with saline, then polishes and seals the bronze to slow further damage. It may take him a half hour, but he says it feels as if he is "caressing the victims of the Nazis one last time."  He has noticed an increase in nationalism around the world, and feels it is important to remember what happened then to prevent its recurrence in the future.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today, I'm taking a break from my usual blog in which I highlight one right thing done by an individual. The reason? Today, April 24 2017, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Because of its origin on the Hebrew calendar, the day falls on a different Gregorian calendar date every year. Unesco has set January 27th as Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I suppose that makes two dates each year in which we are to remember. Either way, the date's purpose is to give us pause so we can remember victims of the Holocaust and to refocus on the pledge: Never Again.

Twenty years ago, Holocaust survivors talked with school students and civic groups, putting a personal face and story to the greater horror. Fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are alive now to share their stories in person. Thankfully, many documented their truths via the archives at US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and numerous books, articles, and videos. There is great wisdom there, free for the asking.

And so here we are, a third generation away from those horrible events, and the question is as relevant as ever - have we learned the lessons of history so we can, with confidence, say 'Never Again'?

Prejudice and racial/religious profiling still exist worldwide, including right in our own country, our own towns. People are still lumped into categories and weighed against a popular standard in an assessment of worth. Genocide, wiping out entire populations based on some defining feature, still happens around the world.

In addition to the prevalence of anti-semitism in today's world, the 'other' victims of the Nazi regime also continue to be viewed as lesser human beings, still fighting for basic rights and basic dignities. This includes people who are homosexual, disabled, Roma Gypsies, or anyone who resists their government's status quo.

So no, even with two recognized dates in which to examine our prejudices and our actions toward one another, we haven't learned. The possibility of another holocaust is quite real.

God help us.

And that's why I continue to read and write about those years. I can't change history, and I can't fix the world. But I must do what I can to share what I've learned with subsequent generations. Anyone who reads Risking Exposure and its sequel (my work-in-progress) will hopefully see how dreadfully simple it is to move from feeling prejudices to verbalizing them to acting upon them (or turning a blind eye while others do so.) Only awareness of the historical cost will prevent us from going down that road again.