So It Goes

Kristallnacht: The Other Anniversary

HOW INTERESTING THAT TODAY, NOVEMBER 9, is the anniversary of one of the most exhilarating moments of happiness in 20th century history and one of the most terrifying: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht in 1938. One is a celebration of liberation, the other a solemn remembrance of how a people became enemies of their own country overnight.

I don't mean to dim the bright light of elation we should all feel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, to make any comparisons or to suggest that one was linked to the other -- though for those in the East the dark cloud of dehumanization that appeared in 1930s Germany and Austria hovered for another 50 years.

For some reason, it just seemed appropriate to think for at least a few minutes about what was a pivotal moment in the war against the Jews in Europe. For Jews in Germany and Austria who had hoped the ominous depredations imposed on them by the Nazis would either level off or go away, Kristallnacht was a clear message that they were in serious danger. It shook and frightened them, hastening their efforts to find refuge elsewhere. Some got out, many didn't because many governments around the world, including the U.S., were unwilling to be burdened by them.

For those not familiar, Kristallnacht was a Nazi government-inspired pogrom against German and Austrian Jews. The pretext for the pogrom was a Jew's assassination of a government official in the Germany Embassy in Paris. That incident set off a flurry of violent attacks on Jews and their personal and communal property.

In his 1985 historical book "The Holocaust," Sir Martin Gilbert described the toll:

"Bonfires were lit in every neighbourhood where Jews lived. On them were thrown prayer books, Torah scrolls, and countless volumnes of philosophy, history and poetry. In thousands of streets, Jews were chased, reviled and beaten up.

"In twenty-four hours of street violence, ninety-one Jews were killed. More than thirty thousand -- and one in ten of those who remained -- were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Before most of them were released two to three months later, as many as a thousand had been murdered, 244 of them in Buchenwald. A further eight thousand Jews were evicted from Berlin: children from orphanages, patients from hospitals, old people from old peoples' homes. There were many suicides....

"During the night, as well as breaking into tens of thousands of shops and homes, the Stormtroops set fire to one hundred and ninety-one synagogues.... The destruction of the synagogues led the Nazis to call that night Kristallnacht, or 'night of the broken glass'; words chosen deliberately to mock and belittle."

For a more personal reflection from a surviver of that terrifying time and for some images of the destruction, click here.

As I sit here in the quiet of my house in a country where I move freely and fearlessly, it's hard to imagine what it must be like to witness this sudden and furious spasm of violence aimed at everything that sustains me -- to have, as the survivor in the video relates, neighbors break down my door and run through the house destroying everything in sight. And, knowing now what would happen over the next several years, it is terrifying to think how quickly the tide can turn. And, finally, it is unfathomable to understand how desperate it must have felt to be trapped inside this hostile land with few options to leave.

It is almost like being buried alive. Indeed, that's exactly what it was.

Jeff

Photo above: A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, on November, 10 1938. [Photo Credit: The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, ed. Yitzhak Arad. New York: Macmillan, 1990.]

Some Good News

FIRST THE BAD NEWS: they're still out there, those crazy-ass guys who believe the Holocaust never happened, that Jews control the world, non-whites are genetically deficient, homosexuals are emissaries of the devil, all Muslims are terrorists, etcetera, etcetera. According to the watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center, the numbers of hate groups are growing, up by 54 percent between 2000 and 2008.

More bad news: they will probably always be out there. Much as I hate to believe it, history has shown the staying power of hatred is remarkable, more resilient than cockroaches. As the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska once wrote in a brilliant poem entitled, appropriately enough, "Hatred":

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape -
our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How easily it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it....

,,,,It's always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait a while, it will.
They say it's blind. Blind?
It's got a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.

Now some good news: hatred doesn't always go unchallenged. Indeed, we've seen many times and in many places how majorities of people often do the right thing when hatred appears. They suffocate it with the sound of their own voices.

Just one small and recent example. In Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., Ken Meyercord, a local resident who has long claimed the Holocaust never happened, ran unopposed for a seat on the Reston Citizens Association, a quasi-governmental body representing more than 60,000 residents in a non-municipality.

Alerted to Meyercord's pronouncements about the Holocaust (not to mention his advocacy of zero population growth, a cause that many have used as a pseudo-intellectual cover for anti-immigrant racism), Reston resident Debra Steppel stepped up and launched a write-in campaign to oppose his candidacy. The result of the election just two days ago: the write-in candidate Colin Mills trounced Meyercord 1,157 to 23.

A small, isolated victory, one might say, but consider the response to the fatal shooting by a white supremacist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum only a few weeks ago. The outcry from many quarters was loud and clear. There was a sense that this was not just a shooting, terrible as that is, but something even more sinister, an attack not just on a museum guard but on the entire community. Even the shooter's own son denounced him, saying, "My father's actions are unforgivable."

And in places like Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where neo-Nazi skinhead groups had congregated and thrived for many years, citizen groups fought them by exposing them, denouncing them, prosecuting them and courageously crowding them out of what most of us understand as decent society.

That's the key. In this country at least, we don't legally prohibit someone from uttering hate or mobilizing people around it, nor should we. What's even more powerful is when the rest of us put hatred in its proper place, which is out of the mainstream, away from respectable society and far from the prospect of gaining legitimacy. That takes the kind of effort and persistence that Debra Steppel showed in Reston. Considering the stakes -- that some might mistake silence for acceptance, which is the foothold that sends hatred beyond our reach -- it's well worth it. Indeed, we who value the health of our society have no other choice.

Notwithstanding their growth in recent years, as the SPLC has shown, haters still, by all measures, represent a minuscule proportion of the population. They make a lot more noise and wreak much more devastation than their numbers suggest, but their actions resound more loudly when the rest of the public square is empty, when the rest of us are passive and silent.

Jeff

Polish Rescuers of Jews and "The Habit of Breathing"

WHENEVER I HAVE READ ABOUT or been in the presence of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews from the Nazi extermination machine, I can't help but ask myself a question: what would I have done if I had been in their place?

And when we think through all the pressures that many of them faced in that circumstance -- not the ordinary, workaday stresses we prattle on about in our lives today -- we have to wonder if we would have been so courageous. It's not only the threat of torture and death that hung oppressively and in some cases for years over their heads, but also the possibility that what they were doing could endanger so many others in their families and immediate neighborhood, people who had not themselves signed up for such a dangerous mission.

What the rest of us lack and they apparently mustered was a recognition that the gain -- to save a life -- was worth the risk.

I had the opportunity a few nights ago to attend a small reception for five Polish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (accompanied by two of the Polish Jews they had rescued), also known as "Righteous Among the Nations," the official designation according to the Israeli Holocaust memorial and research center, Yad Vashem. Again, the question of what I would do in their place went through my mind. What was even more striking to me were the comments of one of the rescuers, who said he expected little attention during their week or so touring several U.S. cities. Instead he said, people were treating them like heroes.

For example, they attended a performance in New York of a new Broadway show, "Irena's Vow," the story of a Polish Catholic woman (played by Tovah Feldshuh) who risked her life to save 12 Jews in Poland during the war. After she took her curtain calls, Feldshuh introduced the five rescuers, who were met with a thunderous, prolonged standing ovation from the audience.

They also appeared in a photo on Page One of the Washington Post the day I saw them -- pretty high-profile media real estate for anyone. And then, on April 23, they sat in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda for the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony. There, President Obama recognized them personally in front of the large assembly of some of our nation's most prominent political, religious and human rights leaders. "We are awed by your acts of courage and conscience," the President said of the five. "And your presence today compels each of us to ask ourselves whether we would have done what you did. We can only hope that the answer is yes."

How could anyone with such a personal history expect to be treated as anything less than a hero, unless they saw what they did as not heroic at all but just something that we as human beings have no choice to do. Like breathing. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in his examination of the Prophets, "No one expects to receive a reward for the habit of breathing. Justice is as much a necessity as breathing is, and a constant occupation."

Their presence here in the U.S. also helps educate American Jews about the complexity of the relationship between Polish Jews and their non-Jewish fellow citizens throughout history. I say complexity because I think it's fair to say that most Jews here who have not closely examined the historical record about that relationship are prone to rather black-and-white impressions: that all Poles were (and remain) anti-Semites and that all of them were responsible for the extermination of what was, before the war, a population of more than three million Polish Jews.

As Michael Steinlauf, the author of one of the best studies of that complex relationship, "Bondage to the Dead," wrote: "In relation to the Jews, although Poles collectively were powerless to affect their fate as a whole, this was not the case on an individual level. Individual Poles could and did help save, or destroy, individual Jews. Although most Poles did neither, doing nothing was itself, for each individual, the product of choice."

Later in the book, Steinlauf expands: "On a popular level, the murder of the Jews evoked a range of responses, from compassion to the opinion that their fate was 'not our business,' to the judgment that the Germans had provided an unpleasant but necessary solution to an intractable problem. For most Poles, however, none of these feelings inspired any action. No different, in this respect, from other non-Jews under Nazi occupation, most Poles were passive witnesses to the fate of the Jews." That's what made those who acted with compassion all the more remarkable, heroic.

What many of us in the Jewish community also misunderstand is the extent to which Poles were victims of the Nazis, too -- not categorically targeted for extermination but to become something of a class of slaves to the master Aryan Nazis. They were killed, starved and otherwise persecuted. Indeed, Polish Catholic clergy, political leaders, intellectuals and military officers were the first inhabitants of Auschwitz before it became the mechanized killing center and the largest burial ground of Jews.

That's why former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's pronouncement about 20 years ago that every Pole "sucked anti-Semitism with his mother's milk", so angered Poles and all those who saw the history as much more nuanced than that. And it's why Poles get so justifiably angry when newspapers, even supposedly respectable ones, still to this day use the phrase "Polish death camps" when referring to places like Auschwitz-Birkenau. In fact, these terrible places were the creation of the Nazis and located in Poland in large part because there were so many Jews there to be had and because Poland was a central point in Europe to gather them and kill them. Yes, there were some Poles who were complicit in the Nazi crimes, but, as Steinlauf says, most were "passive witnesses," either out of fear or indifference.

There are many in Poland who are committed to facing up to this reality, not least the Polish Government itself, which fairly emphatically and courageously did what it could after the fall of Communism to sort out the history and reconcile with it however possible. (Some issues, such as restitution of Jewish property in Poland, will long be unsettled because of their legal, political and psychological complexity.)

Others, like a group I've been supportive of, the Forum for Dialogue Among the Nations, actively engage Poles and Jews, young and old, to face up to the history, to understand it better than they do now and to move the two communities to deal as much with their future as they do the past.

It's a big, but important mission, and one that is full of the sort of inspiration that I experienced the other night with the five Polish rescuers.

Jeff