Kristallnacht - Through the Eyes of a Schindler Survivor's Son

Featured on the Times of Israel Blog

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, Nazi German leaders unleashed a nationwide

antisemitic riot.  This week marked 87 years after this unconscionable event. The violence was supposed to appear as an unplanned outburst of popular anger against Jews. But in reality, it was state-sponsored terror of Jews manifested in vandalism and fear.  The riot came to be known as Kristallnacht – "The Night of Broken Glass" or "The November Pogrom."  The widespread terror throughout the country was seen in 1400 synagogues that were burned by the Nazis – religious objects that were desecrated.  There was also vandalism of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, and the Nazis had broken into countless Jewish homes.  During Kristallnacht, the German police imprisoned about 26,000 Jewish men only because they were Jewish and deported them to concentration camps.

What led up to Kristallnacht was the increasingly restrictive and violent anti-Jewish measures in 1938 under the reign of Adolf Hitler. They were undertaken to drive Jews out of Germany.  During October 27 – 29th of that year, the Nazis deported more than 17,000 Jewish people – targeting Jews with Polish citizenship and passports in Germany.  It was the first mass deportation of Jews from the country.  It included the Grynszpan family.  The parents and two of the Grynszpan’s children had been deported from Hanover to Zbaszyn in Poland.  The family had a 17-year old son – living in Paris at the time.  After learning what happened to his

family, he went to the German Embassy in Paris.  On the morning of November 7th, he shot and killed a German diplomat –  Ernst vom Rath.  Apparently, the murder was due to the son’s rage for the deportation of his family from Germany and other Jews with Polish citizenship.

Nazi leadership decided to use the murder as a long-anticipated excuse to undertake a national anti-wide Jewish riot.  Beginning on November 7th, Propaganda Minister for the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels, coordinated the Jewish violence and exploited the murder as part of a world Jewish conspiracy. The Nazi leadership cynically claimed that the pogrom was not organized in any way, and that the Jews themselves had provoked the righteous anger of the German people.

Kristallnacht was the impetus for the Holocaust manifested in hatred and executed with racial desecration – in short, dehumanization.  It’s origin rested in fundamental Nazi idealism – the hatred of others that were perceived as a threat to the Aryan race, especially Jews. Its effectiveness was executed in the manipulation of people’s minds – channeled through propaganda and conspiracy.  It was seen as ethnic cleansing based upon nothing that was real.

“The Night of Broken Glass” wasn’t due to revenge, or any form of justice for the vom Rath Murder.  It was nothing but unconscionable conspiracy.  The German nation had been told by the Nazis they must hold a religion, race, and culture accountable for the actions of one.

But Oskar Schindler, who saved my mother’s life and an immeasurable number of other Jewish lives in the Holocaust, finally differentiated himself from Nazi ideology.  They saw Jews as only parasitic vermin that must be exterminated on an unprecedented scale.  Schindler finally stood apart from the antisemitism that penetrated throughout Germany, the rest of Europe, and far too many others in every other part of the world.

My mother actually never told me she was a “Schindler” Jew until my father had told me that on Yom Kippur day, 1993, while in synagogue.  It was five years after she’d passed away.  The Rabbi’s sermon for Yom Kippur was the story of “Schindler’s List” due to the film being released in the coming weeks. Her trauma due to the Holocaust that manifested in hatred for Germans is why I felt that she never said to me or my brother that she was a “Schindler” survivor.  The story is being told in my debut book, In the Midst of Darkness, coming soon.

Initially, Schindler, as a member of the Nazi party - and its conviction to fascism -exploited Jews. Firstly, he confiscated the Emalia factory in Plaszow Poland from three Jewish owners in 1939.  Nazi decrees no longer would let Jews own property.  He also employed Jews due to being cheap labor, while knowing they were in a concentration camp, with barely enough food to survive.  But after he’d finally seen the atrocities that were being inflicted upon Jews in the Krakow Ghetto and the Plaszow concentration camp, he saved Jewish lives to a reach that was unforgettable. They were probably never more certain of their fate inevitably being death.   Schindler found humanity when there were very few that did in a world that didn’t feel differently.

The story of Oskar Schindler has been told along with the memory of Kristallnacht for us to see “That what brings us together can overcome what pulls us apart.”  The Night of Broken Glass that turned into the darkest chapter in the world’s history was based on nothing that was true, but Schindler eventually recognized that delusional reality after he’d seen the immeasurable carnage of the Holocaust, which infected a world. The learning by how we can’t forget what he did can’t be more pivotal since that time than now. He was a Nazi that risked his life and everything he had to save every Jewish life he could. The Jews were the

race that the Nazi party convinced a nation and too many others everywhere else in the world, who were the enemies. 

How can we not, as a world, especially seeing the divide today, not want to act more like those amongst the righteous during the Holocaust  – people like Oskar Schindler, Irena Sendler, and Raoul Walberg –  non-Jews who saved Jews from a genocide?  But Schindler, apart from the others needed to see inhumanity to come back to humanity.  As we’ve seen from each of them, they weren’t influenced by others who were convinced of what they heard being the truth.  It’s our responsibility to act like they did that will let us prevent another genocide like the Holocaust from ever happening again.