Monday, November 9, 2009

KRISTALLNACHT: THE NOVEMBER 1938 POGROMS

KRISTALLNACHT: THE NOVEMBER 1938 POGROMS

Local residents watch the burning of the ceremonial hall at the Jewish cemetery in Graz during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). Graz, Austria, November 9-10, 1938.

“Seventy-one years ago, on November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed during the pogroms. Encouraged by the Nazi regime, the rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside. Kristallnacht was a turning point in history. The pogroms marked an intensification of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that would culminate in the Holocaust—the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews.”

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/kristallnacht/

In the late spring of 1993, just before we were married, Gloria and I visited the United States Holocaust Museum. We had tour reservations for the public exhibit. But before our group was admitted, we met with a museum curator. Gloria donated some artifacts from Dachau for her father, who was the 1st Sgt of the first U.S. medical unit to enter Dachau camp. I donated a “sonder komando” brassard that had been given to me. After signing the necessary paperwork, we went back to the public area and entered one of the most emotionally brutal experiences I’ve ever encountered outside a battlefield.

The entry to the tour areas is an elevator constructed from one of the boxcars actually used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. Just stepping into the car and watching the door close, hearing the lock engaged should be a warning.

Each person who tours the museum is given a card with the name of a person who was a prisoner in one of the death camps. Some visitors get a card with a survivor. I don’t recall what was on Gloria’s card. Mine described a 12 year old girl who was murdered at Treblinka. The various exhibits lead from the arrival at Auschwitz through the process of sorting and selecting the prisoners to see who lives as a slave and who goes up the chimneys or into the pits. Exhibits show piles of household and kitchen implements taken from the luggage of those who carried them to the end of hope. Other exhibits consist of piles of coats, of hats, of shoes. The exhibit that snuck up behind me was a wall of photographs that had not yet been discarded. Some were ripped or partially burned as if they had been found particularly offensive to whomever was sorting them. There was one photo of a couple about the same age as Gloria and I, probably a wedding photo. To this day I find it painful to recall that exhibit. Near by that wall of photographs is a bridge to the next area with floor and wall of glass. As you cross the bridge you notice that there are names etched into the glass. Not names of people, however, these are the names names of Shtetls, villages and small towns in Ukraine and Russia that were simply wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazi Special Aktion Gruppen, aided by Ukrainians and Russians, all too eager to turn in their Jewish neighbors; then burned from the earth by Stalin’s Scorched Earthy policy. In many cases, only one person may have lived to recall the name of his or her shtetl so that it could be etched into these walls of glass. My ancestral shtetle, Polonnoye, according to the best history available had nearly 9000 Jews in residence at the onset of the “Great Patriotic War.” “The 7,670 victims of Polonini - from the general number of 8,679 - died only because they were of Jewish nationality”. By wars end, 11 were known to be survivors. Polonnoye exists today and at the end of 1991 there were only about 100 Jews living there. Prior to the Holocaust, Polonnoye had existed as a center of Jewish life and religion in the Pale for over 5 centuries.

Polonnoye quotes from:

Book of Memory; Suffering of Jews that Died

During the Nazi Occupation; History of Polonnoye Jews

(Ukraine)

50°07' / 27°31'

Written and compiled 1987-1991. Completed by Semyon Lvovich Bentsianov,

member of Ukrainian Journalist Union

For anyone wanting more information about Polonnoye,

http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/polonnoye/polonnoye.html#TOC

http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Polonnoye/

The sheer number of place names on the walls of that bridge stagger the mind. It is impossible to absorb the fact that so many villages filled with people just vanished forever. It is, all too painfully possible to direct the anger and grief that surfaces toward one photo of a nameless but no forgotten couple who dared to think their lives would be lived out peacefully and in love. I will never know what happened to them but I know with certainty that they did not survive the Holocaust. They were too old to be useful as slaves, too poor to buy or bribe their way to safety for even another night. I hope their death came easily and I hope they met it together, hand-in-hand.

Tonight is the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht


An Army of 750 - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943


In 3.5 square miles once lived 500,000 souls placed there by hatred.

A small spot on a continent riven yet again by marching men,

They suffered cold, starvation, wanton executions.

By 1943 they were but one of ten

The continent around them but an open graveyard,

A war they had not chosen, a war they could not win.

Yet from despair and certainty of death an army grew to be.



They waited, and they died unknown while Stalingrad took center stage.

While Moscow burned and Leningrad held fast.

While convoys succored Murmansk, they died by the thousands.

While London suffered bombings, in a world at war, their needs came last.

Past Coral Sea and Midway, while troops took tropic isles,

Here, boxcars carried those who clung so meekly to their past.

With smuggled guns and handmade mines an army grew to be.



There were those who fought for life with pen and ink,

Their journals cry aloud beyond their final breath.

Some, who could, escaped the ghetto walls by any means they might

And tried survival in a land according them no worth.

And few there were who chose to stay and plan for struggle

Who cried for freedom with their lives and bought it with their deaths.

And as the death toll heightened an army grew to be.



Hiding on the rooftops, waiting, watching, Erev Pesach.

The enemy caught in ambush, flung from the ghetto walls.

Another sortie in, another ambush and another.

Re-arming with the weapons of the enemies that fall.

Each skirmish costing lives that could not be replaced.

Soldiers paying with their lives at each alarm call.

In their grim determination an army learned to fight.



The high ground was denied them, blown and burned to rubble.

No Borodino, Gettysburg, no room to retreat.

Into the ground then, striking out of bunkers,

Carved beneath the burning rubble, fetid sewers, empty streets.

Never seeing daylight, always thirsty, far outnumbered,

But every shot they fired denied defeat.

In that bitter spring the new army called in vain for outside help.



No more than 750 were their numbers, against thousands.

Writtenlarge and bold their names, in blood, on history’s pages.

They fought for freedom, dignity, humanity’s survival,

As the noblest soldiers have down through all ages.

Their bravery broke a myth as sunrise breaks up darkness

When the Warsaw Ghetto rose in arms beneath Magen David.

A small army, born in hopelessness, recalled forever with greatest honor.

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