HOLOCAUST EDUCATION WEEK: Closing program focuses on Kristallnacht’s meaning

Holocaust Education Week’s scholar-in-residence Doris L. Bergen gave the keynote speech at the event. MICHAEL RAJZMAN/ NEUBERGER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE PHOTO

TORONTO — Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom that occurred 76 years ago to the day before Holocaust Education Week’s 2014 closing night event, has taken on a coherency that’s not entirely consistent with actual events.

In her keynote speech at the closing ceremony, HEW’s scholar-in-residence, Doris L. Bergen, addressed this dissonance between contemporary understandings of Kristallnacht and the more immediate recording of events throughout Nazi Germany and Austria that night, as seen in the diaries and memoirs of both Jewish and non-Jewish eyewitnesses. 

The Nov. 9 event at Beth Tzedec Congregation was attended by several hundred people, and Bergen’s talk was preceded by a procession of the General Wingate Branch 256 Royal Canadian Legion and the Jewish War Veterans of Canada, Toronto Post, as well as a brief address by Beth Tzedec’s Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl and a candle-lighting ceremony involving a number of Holocaust survivors and their families.  

Of the co-ordinated 1938 attacks on German and Austrian Jews in their homes, schools, synagogues and businesses, in which at least 91 Jews were murdered and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps, Bergen said: “Now, Kristallnacht has a name. It has stock images and photographs associated with it… [and] events around the world to commemorate it. We’ve shaped it. But in recollections of Kristallnacht from survivors, eyewitnesses, accounts produced at the time, you don’t see this coherence. You see chaos, confusion and terrible crisis.”

She explained that the name Kristallnacht, which means “night of broken glass,” was actually coined by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to emphasize the shattered glass broken in Jewish-owned shop windows. The purpose was to perpetuate the myth that all German Jews were wealthy business owners, Bergen said.

“The idea of synagogues [being smashed] would’ve been less popular [among many non-Jews],” she said.

Even the iconic photographs commonly associated with Kristallnacht, such as those of the grand synagogues in Hanover and Frankfurt burning, were mostly taken by Nazi photographers, Bergen said, and deliberately leave the perpetrators of the destruction out of the frame. 

Other, more authentic records, she noted, depict a far more brutal and disorienting reality than those generated by the Nazi propaganda machine. 

“The most vulnerable elements of the Jewish population were hit the hardest [during Kristallnacht],” she said. “Nazi thugs attacked Jewish orphanages… The elderly were singled out for particular kinds of torment… In Vienna, 200 Jewish women were arrested, stripped naked and forced to perform demeaning acts.” 

It’s important to focus on the more immediate reactions of Jews (and non-Jews) to Kristallnacht because, through these accounts we can, Bergen said, “draw attention to the absolute uncertainty and panic that all Jews all over German territory felt at this time.” 

For many Jews, Kristallnacht triggered terrifying questions about whether they should flee their homes, as well as where they might be able to seek refuge and whether it was better for families to stay together or separate. 

Many didn’t anticipate that these events, which Bergen referred to as “a pre-genocidal hallmark of ethnic cleansing,” would mark the beginning of a period of unimaginable horrors, or that the violence would have repercussions beyond Germany’s borders. 

“There was, at the time, a lack of understanding of what, in hindsight, seems obvious: that this violence wouldn’t stop at the borders of Germany,” Bergen said.

She continued: “Now, we think of Kristallnacht as the beginning of the war. But then, people didn’t have this perspective… they looked to the past, to Jewish history, to understand. There are diaries and memoirs of Jews at that time who experienced Kristallnacht and compared it to pogroms in czarist Russia or to medieval violence against Jews.”

She concluded by stressing that thinking about Kristallnacht both as it is understood now and as it was experienced more directly after the fact is important, because it’s “a reminder of how much we still do not know about the Holocaust – even about some of it’s most well-known incidents. It’s a reminder to both continue learning from and learning about the Holocaust.”