11.16.08
The legacy of Kristallnacht
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/04/germany-secondworldwar
The Guardian November 4 2008
The legacy of Kristallnacht
Seventy years ago this week the Nazis led a brutal attack on German Jews,
their businesses and their synagogues, a prelude to the Holocaust. Paul
Oestreicher remembers the night terror struck
Paul Oestreicher
A vandalised shop in Berlin on November 17 1938. Businesses and properties
owned by Jews were target of vicious Nazi mobs during the night of vandalism
that is known as ‘Kristallnacht’. Photograph: Corbis
Berliners went wild that day, 19 years ago. The impossible had happened. The
Wall had come down. It was November 9 1989. I wasn’t there. But I was there
on that same date in 1938, 70 years ago. Germans went wild on that day, too.
They let loose an orgy of destruction. The synagogues were set ablaze.
Jewish shops were smashed up and pillaged. Jewish men were rounded up,
beaten up, some to death, many sent to concentration camps. What eventually
followed was unthinkable. The streets that night were strewn with broken
glass. The Germans called it Kristallnacht, the night not of broken glass
but broken crystal, to symbolise the “ill-gotten Jewish riches” Germans
would now take from them. Never mind the many Jewish poor. Never mind that
Jews such as my grandparents were Germans as deeply patriotic as any of
their neighbours.
My Christian father, born to Jewish parents, was in 1938 forbidden, as all
Jews were, to continue working as a doctor. From a small provincial town we
fled to Berlin with one aim, common to thousands of Jews at that time, to
find asylum anywhere beyond the reach of Hitler. An only child, six years
old, I was given refuge by kindly non-Jewish friends. Life in their basement
flat bore no horrors for me. I simply wondered why I was not allowed to go
to school.
My parents had gone underground. My non-Jewish mother had resisted the
pressure to divorce her husband and quit a marriage defined by the Nazis as
rassenschande, racial disgrace. My father, hoping not to be picked up on the
street, as many were, trudged from consulate to consulate, wearing the
miniatures of his two iron crosses won in the first world war. Ruefully he
said: “In 1918, as a German officer, I fled from the French. Twenty years
later, I am fleeing from the Germans.”
Now a visa was priceless. The state had confiscated our bank account. We
could not bribe our way to safety. With that visa, Nazi Germany could say
good riddance. If Kristallnacht had a definable purpose, beyond its pure
explosion of hate, it was to make the Jews go away. But, except for the few
who had somehow rescued great wealth, the world did not want them.
The day of the great pogrom started much like any other. But a rare treat
was in store. My mother came to take me for a walk. As a non-Jew she was not
directly threatened. Berlin was bathed in autumn sunshine. We walked to the
Tauentzienstrasse, Berlin’s Regent Street. For me, the big city was full of
wonder – until terror struck. Trucks pulled up at exact intervals.
Jack-booted men wielding wooden clubs ran up and down the street and began
to smash the windows of the Jewish-owned department stores. My mother
grabbed hold of me. We fled. I was soon back in a safe place. My parents
left Berlin before the day was out and were hidden in Leipzig by a
sympathetic member of the Nazi party. In times of crisis, people are not
always what they seem to be.
The search for asylum became more desperate. It took us another three
months. Many were not so lucky. Nations met at Evian on Lake Geneva to
discuss the plight of Germany’s Jews but shrank from their responsibility.
No effective policy emerged. At least the Australian delegate was frank: “We
have no race problem and we don’t want to import one.” He and many others
around the world bought into Hitler’s fanciful racial doctrine. Antisemitism
was not just a German aberration. “Why should we import a problem the
Germans are so keen to get rid of?” By early 1939, Britain felt “we have
done our bit”. President Roosevelt firmly refused to increase the American
quota.
Our choice narrowed down to Venezuela and New Zealand. The New Zealand
government’s attitude was like that of its neighbour. Jewish applicants were
told explicitly: “We do not think you will integrate into our society. If
you insist on applying, expect a refusal.” My father did insist. The
barriers were high. Either you had a job to come to, at a time of high
unemployment, or you had to produce two wealthy guarantors and in addition
bring with you, at today’s values, £2,000 per head. We were only able to
take that hurdle thanks to the generosity of a remarkable Frenchman, a
friend of a distant relative. This was the sort of money most refugees could
not possibly raise. At a total of 1,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews, the
New Zealand government drew the line. We were lucky. My grandmother, who
hoped to follow us, was not. It was too late. She did not survive the
Holocaust. Like many others, she chose suicide rather than the cattle-truck
journey to Auschwitz. Britain, thanks to a group of persistent lobbyists, at
the last moment agreed to take a substantial number of Jewish children. Most
were never to see their parents again. Their contribution to British life
was significant, now that the stories of the kindertransport are being told.
I tell my story on this anniversary not just for its historic and personal
interest, but because it brings into sharp focus the far from humane
attitude of Britain, the European Union and many other rich countries to the
asylum seekers of today. True, there are now international conventions that
did not exist in 1938, but they are seldom obeyed in spirit or in letter.
The German sentiment “send them away” has given way in Britain and in many
other parts of Europe to “send them back”, sometimes to more persecution and
even death. Lessons from history are seldom learned.
Dr Peter Selby, president of the National Council of Independent Monitoring
Boards, has written with justifiable anger of his experience of Britain’s
immigration removal centres at ports and airports, which are prisons in all
but name. We lock up children, separated from their parents, hold detainees
for indefinite periods, and many are made ill by the experience. Those who
advocate tougher immigration policies, such as Frank Field’s Migration
Watch, are accountable, writes Selby, for the coercive instruments – the
destitution and detention – that are already being used and will be used
even more to enforce it. This is not quite our 1938, but the parallels are
deeply disquieting.
An even sadder consequence of this story of anti-Jewish inhumanity is that
many of the survivors who fled to Palestine did so at the expense of the
local people, the Palestinians, half of whom were driven into exile and
their villages destroyed. Their children and children’s children live in the
refugee camps that now constitute one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian
impasse that embitters Islam and threatens world peace: all that a
consequence of Nazi terror and indirectly of the Christian world’s
persecution of the Jewish people over many centuries.
With fear bred into every Jewish bone, it is tragic that today many Israelis
say of the Palestinians, as once the Germans said of them: “The only
solution is to send them away.” However understandable this reaction may be,
to do so, or even to contemplate it, is a denial of all that is good in
Judaism. To create another victim people is to sow the seeds of another
holocaust. When, in the 1930s, the Right Rev George Bell, Bishop of
Chichester, pleaded in vain for active British support for the German
opposition to Hitler, many accused him of being anti-German. The opposite
was true. He did not tar all Germans with the Nazi brush. Today, those of us
who offer our solidarity to the minority of Israelis working – in great
isolation – for justice for the Palestinian people, are often accused of
being antisemitic. The opposite is true. It is a tragic parallel.
November 9 is deeply etched into German history. On that day in 1918 the
Kaiser abdicated. Germany had lost the first world war. Five years later to
the day, Hitler’s followers were shot down in the streets of Munich. The
Nazis, year by year, celebrated their martyrs. Then came 1938:
Kristallnacht. Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial and other memorials in many
German towns and villages, where once the synagogue stood, are mute
reminders of what began that day. But the significance and the shame of that
day stretches far beyond those who set the synagogues alight. Who, we need
to ask, are the victims now, both near and far, and what is our response?
• Canon Dr Paul Oestreicher is a former chair of Amnesty International UK