The Nazi "Kristallnacht", Night of Broken
Glass, began 63 years ago today. On this night of terror, which
prefigured the Holocaust to come, the Germans brutally orchestrated
widespread attacks against Jews, torching Jewish-owned property,
demolishing Jewish homes, and burning synagogues to the ground. No
complete tally exists of the destruction, but at least 30,000 Jews
were arrested (8,000 in Austria) and sent to concentration camps at
Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Scores of Jews were killed and
dozens severely injured.—Source: Encyclopedia Judaica
KRISTALLNACHT
Sue Saniel
Elkind
From Beyond Lament: Poets of the World
Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, ed. Marguerite Striar, published
by Northwestern Univ. Press, 1998
Blackness
broken by streamers/of light from
trucks
Trembling mothers
hide children/beg them "be
still"
others try escape
All the time
marching feet/slam
against cement
stopping only as marchers
hurl rocks/leaving
shards of bone
Ramrods/ Violate houses
people
lie splintered/amid slivers of glass
Their screams
become one
Old and young/herded outside
prodded to
run
"Jew, jew" following them
Bullets fired/shatter windows of
dreams
that will become eternal/nightmares.
TWO POEMS BY NELLY
SACHS
From O the Chimneys, published by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967
O THE NIGHT OF THE WEEPING
CHILDREN
O the night of the weeping children!
O the
night of the children branded for death!
Sleep may not enter
here.
Terrible nursemaids/ Have usurped the place of
mothers,
Have tautened their tendons with the false death,
Sow
it on to the walls and into the beams—
Everywhere it is hatched
in the nests of horror.
Instead of mother's milk, panic suckles
those little ones.
Yesterday Mother still drew
Sleep toward them
like a white moon,
There was the doll with cheeks derouged by
kisses
In one arm,
The stuffed pet, already
Brought to
life by love,
In the other—
Now blows the wind of
dying,
Blows the shifts over the hair/ That no one will comb
again.
O THE
CHIMNEYS
And though after my skin worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.—Job, 19:26
O the chimneys
On the ingeniously devised
habitations of death
When Israel's body drifted as
smoke
Through the air—
Was welcomed by a star, a chimney
sweep,
A star that turned black
Or was it a ray of sun?
O the chimneys!
Freedomway for Jeremiah and
Job's dust—Who devised you and laid stone upon stone
The road for
refugees of smoke?
O the habitations of death,
Invitingly
appointed/ For the host who used to be a guest—
O you
fingers/Laying the threshold
Like a knife between life and
death—
O you chimneys,/ O you fingers
And Israel's
body as smoke through the air!
HAVDALAH
Paul
Celan
Translated by John Felstiner; Forward,
September 15, 2000
On the one, the
only
thread, on that
you
spin—by that
spun round into
Freeness, out
into
Boundness.
The spindles stand
huge
into untilled land,
the trees: from
underneath a
light is braided into the
airy
matting where you set your table for the empty
chairs and
their
Sabbath radiance in -- --
in honor.
_____________________________________
HITLER WANTED TO DO
IT
Emil L. Fackenheim
Professor Emil Fackenheim, a member of
CIJR's International Board, was born in Germany. One of today's
pre-eminent Jewish theologians, he is professor of philosophy
emeritus at the University of Toronto. After making aliyah to Israel
in 1983, he taught at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
What he loved about fire was
not the Promethean aspect, but its destructive force.
…fire itself, literally and
directly, stirred a profound excitement in him. I recall his
ordering showings in the Chancellery of the
films of burning London, of the sea of
flames over Warsaw, of exploding convoys, and the
rapture with which he watched those films. I
never saw him so worked up as toward the end of the war, when in a
kind of delirium he pictured for himself and for
us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of
fire. He described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic
burning torches, collapsing
upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the
dark sky."1
Thus wrote Albert Speer. He was the
only one who at Nuremberg admitted guilt, was hated for that by his
Nazi cronies, all on trial, but was loved by Americans naïve enough
to make his book a bestseller, loving him even more because,
supposedly, he stopped Hitler from making Germany into a desert,
uninhabitable since "the best had already died." But, then came the
Marshall Plan and with it a democratic Germany, and hence no fear of
another Hitler. Someone in Newsweek thinks now we should have a
Marshall Plan for the Arab world as well (I haven't checked Time
Magazine).
As for Speer, he claimed that, what
with all he had to do-- first, obeying Hitler as chief organizer of
his war effort, then disobeying him when he sought to destroy
Germany--he did not notice "special trains" to Auschwitz. But anyone
reading his book sceptically realizes that he never overcame his
fascination with Hitler until the Fuehrer was dead.
On account of the turmoil of "black"
September 11 nobody mentions Hitler, to say nothing of the "Law of
Return"; yet Hitler is still relevant, and this law is the only
thing Israelis have done--nay, that that Jews world-wide could have
done--in response to the Holocaust: at "Auschwitz" they killed not
only Jews but also did their best to kill the Jewish faith: only
because Jews returned not only to Jewish statehood, but also to
"Jerusalem"--albeit, alas, far from a messianic return--did Judaism
survive.
What Hitler wanted to do,
"fanatical" Muslim "extremists" have done and--like Hitler,
Goebbels, Goering, Himmler--they escaped justice through suicide. In
contrast, however, the New York- and Washington- "fanatical" Muslim
"extremists" killed not only themselves, but also thousands of
innocent others when, in contrast, Hitler's cronies killed only
themselves. But this does not mean they were less evil, for had they
had the power, they would surely have done what Mohammed Atta and
the like-minded others did: indeed, if one wants to know what
"Radical Evil" is, one must study the Holocaust.
To quote the London Daily
Telegraph:
Yet Mr. [Tony] Blair is
demanding that Israel resume talks with Mr Arafat as if the
suicide bombings, which some 75 per cent of
Palestinians support, had never
happened.
Why should Israel trust a man who has probably had more Jews killed
in the past 50 years than anyone since Hitler?2
1. Albert Speer: Spandau: Secret
Diaries, translated by Richard and Clara Winston. London:
Collins, 1976, p. 87.
2. Daniel Johnson: To court Arafat is
to succour the enemy of our ally Israel. In The Daily
Telegraph, issue 45.535, Tuesday 16 Oct. 2001.