70 years ago today a significant shift happened in Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews. By the end of the night of November 9 thirty thousand people were arrested and sent to concentration camps, thousands of synagogues and business destroyed. Consequently this night of terror is known as Kristallnacht. The library has three books, listed below with their official description.
Hannele Zurndorfer: The ninth of November
The Ninth of November is the story of the warm and happy childhood of a small girl and her sister, growing up in the Germany of the 1930s in a liberal Jewish family that had for generations been integrated into German provincial life. Hannele Zurndorfer recalls a time when it was still possible, for a child, to be ignorant of the coming dangers of National Socialism. The 9 November 1938 brought home the realization and proof of those very dangers. Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ shattered her childhood and the lives of Jews allover Germany, for ever. Hannele Zurndorfer’s lyrical memory and elegant prose present a filigree history of her life before this darkly significant date, tracing her gradual awareness of tension and menace, to her assimilation in England. This book provides a vivid documentary account of the situation of the time; a gallery of memories, poignantly and sympathetically evoked. Her faithfulness to her childhood experiences, which she recounts without retroactive insights from maturity, makes her story so compelling and remarkable. This is one of those rare personal books which have something to say to everyone.
Rita Thalmann and Emmanuel Feinermann: Crystal night; 9-10 November, 1938
Early in November 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a young German Jew of Polish origin living in Paris, learned that his family had been expelled by the Nazis from their home in Germany and, with thousands of other Polish-born Jews, deported to Poland. Moved by anguish at the plight of his family and race, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy on 7 November and shot the Third Secretary, Ernst vom Rath, who died two days later. Using the murder as a pretext, Hitler ordered the SS and SA, with the connivance of the police and fire Services, to launch the first nation-wide pogrom against the Jews in Germany on the night of 9-10 November (since known as `Crystal Night`, on account of the quantity of shattered glass found in city streets in the morning). Synagogues were burned down, Jewish shops were wrecked and looted, many Jews were beaten up, others were murdered, and some 30,000 of the men (aged between sixteen and eighty) were sent for a period to concentration camps, where many died. The authors of this book are historians who have drawn extensively on German, French, British, American and Israeli sources, including government papers, proceedings of the Nurnberg trials, newspaper articles, Speeches by politicians, Nazi official memoranda and survivors` reports. Beginning in 1933, they describe the increasingly ferocious measures taken by the Nazis against the Jews in the years that followed, leading up to a climax with the assassination of vom Rath, the terror of `Crystal Night`, and its after-math. They then show how the countries (including Britain and the United States) which looked on at the events of November 1938, and neither intervened nor waived their restrictions on the immigration of Jewish refugees, cannot escape a large share of the blame for the tragedy which followed.
Martin Gilbert: Kristallnacht; Prelude to destruction
An acclaimed Churchill biographer and Holocaust scholar, Gilbert makes a strong case in this elegant volume that Kristallnacht was the watershed moment that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Known as “the Night of Broken Glass,” the “coordinated, comprehensive rampage” that began on the night of November 9, 1938, saw Nazi-inspired thugs ransack synagogues and Jewish-owned property across Germany and Austria. Gilbert maintains a tight focus on the individual experiences of Jewish men, women and children during the 24-hour spree of destruction, as well as on Germans and Austrians who rioted, opposed the riot or simply looked the other way. The book begins with a harrowing account of that night’s events, using accounts from news sources of the day: ” ‘Terrified children were turned sobbing out of their beds, which were then smashed to pieces.’” Gilbert devotes a chapter each to eyewitness accounts from Berlin and Vienna, where some of the worst destruction occurred. As Felix Rinde, then an Austrian-Jewish teenager, later wrote, “Jewish life in Vienna came to a virtual end.” A third chapter offers similar accounts from other cities. Gilbert’s commanding account then traces the origins of Kristallnacht in the years of mounting Jewish discrimination that began when Hitler came to power in 1933, and shows how Kristallnacht pointed the way toward the events to come. 8 pages of b&w photos; maps.
We also have a VHS tape of the 1988 Kristallnacht commemoration, held in the Faith Lutheran Church in Santa Rosa.
Leave a comment