They start by breaking glass

The first part of November always gives me the shivers. It’s not just that we go off Daylight Saving Time, so it seems darker all of a sudden; or even that the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November every couple of years is Election Day here. It’s that this is the time we must acknowledge dark deeds that have been done within living memory of our parents and grandparents.

Today is the 80^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On 9 November 1938, in “response” to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a minor functionary in the German embassy in Paris, by a teen-aged Polish Jew, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels orchestrated “spontaneous” acts of outrage on Jewish homes, shops and synagogues throughout Germany.

More than 200 synagogues and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked and torched throughout the Reich (which by then included Austria and most of Czechoslovakia), starting the night of the 9^th and continuing through the next day. Efforts by municipal fire and police services to stop the conflagrations and violence were blocked by Nazi storm troopers. More than 90 Jews were murdered and 30,000 men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Hermann Goering, Oberbefehlshaber  Luftwaffe, Prussian minister of the interior (thus head of the largest police force in Germany) and chief Nazi clothes horse, berated Goebbels for mismanaging the affair—since despite countless millions in goods looted, not a pfennig had made its way into state coffers.

By way of placating Goering, Goebbels decreed that German Jews should pay an indemnity of 1 billion Reichsmarks “for causing the damage” that now littered communities throughout the Reich.

And he collected.

“Kristallnacht” doesn’t really convey the full horror of these events. Although the Nazis had been steadily closing in the walls on Jews according to the blueprint patently evident in Mein Kampf, and had even essayed a public boycott of Jewish businesses (unsuccessful, as it happens, so not repeated) shortly after taking power in 1933, this was the first instance where widespread violence and murder were unleashed on the community.

And this time they were successful. There were no substantial protests either internally or from the fraternity of nations. The Nazis had removed their gloves and revealed their brass knuckles—and no one cared. There were a few lackluster objections from here or there, but no official recognition (much less outrage) that this was a state act of collective violence against a group of people. Likewise no one seemed to connect the dots that there could be other groups on the murder list to be lined up after the Jews were eliminated.

Some decades ago, I was following the pilgrim’s route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela. I’d checked in to the Auberge de Jeunesse in Bordeaux and was riding my bicycle around the town. At one stop light a young man on a bicycle came up beside me—he must have recognized by the panniers that I wasn’t a local—and we struck up a conversation. He was also outfitted for distance—I think he was working the vendange (I ran into a lot of kids at hostels who were following the grape harvest around the country), but at this point I can’t really recall.

Anyhow, he was German and told me that he was heading over to the “main” synagogue (the Great Synagogue). Seems he’d never in his life (of probably 20 years) seen a Jewish temple, and thought he should do so. (My first thought was, “Okay, there’s a reason you’ve never seen a synagogue on the hoof—do you know what that is?” But I didn’t bring it up and neither did he.) He’d been by earlier but was told he should return in the afternoon. He invited me along.

Well, my only diary-entry for Bordeaux was going to be the Centre Jean Moulin (museum of the Résistance), so he and I cycled over to the shul. He was such a trusting soul he didn’t even lock his bike, just leaned it up against the wall.

He rang the bell and we were buzzed in; no one came to greet us, we just went in. I have to say I felt a little on edge—didn’t know whether he was going to pull a Molotov out of his jeans and finish off one of the ones the Nazis missed 35 years earlier. But in the end we just wandered around the sanctuary, unescorted, looking at the space so different from Christian churches.

Actually, at the time this was only the second temple I’d ever been in, so I wasn’t that much further along culturally speaking that my companion.

We could hear voices in other rooms, but no one ever did come out to check on us. After a while, we let ourselves out. He went on to find a place to camp for the night (the hostel’s couple of francs was more than he wanted to spend) and I headed off to the museum. (Which, BTW, had a terrific collection of propaganda posters. Some of them are still quite vivid in my mind.)

I wonder if he’s remembering his first visit to a synagogue on this anniversary, and how he had to travel hundreds of miles out of Germany to find it?

I also wonder if we’ve progressed since 1938—no one did much about the Serbian or Rwandan versions of Kristallnacht, did they?

A few years ago I wondered if we’ve progressed since 1979—would the keepers of a synagogue anywhere today buzz in someone to have unaccompanied free rein of the sanctuary? I found out in 2009 when I retraced the French part of my pilgrimage: you can’t get close to the Great Synagogue; it’s fenced off and I couldn’t even see where you might ring to get someone’s attention. Looking at that iron fence I thought, well, I guess 1979 was that brief window of lull in the storm—between the Nazi anti-Semites and the Islamists and National Front varieties of today.

Given recent events—of the past two years, say—in my own country, I think we have reason to fear that whatever progress we’ve made in the past 80 years is being eradicated. Anti-Semitism is on the rise at an exponential rate. (Following the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh two weeks ago, the racist-in-chief famously counseled that if the shul had only had an armed guard stationed there, all would have been well. Just as Rethugs in NRA pockets advise that arming teachers—and/or students—is the way to prevent Parkland-like bloodbaths. I thought about the temple in Alexandria that my friend attends. During her bat mitzvah I noticed an armed, uniformed Fairfax County cop patrolling the entrance, and I asked her about it. She said there one there for all Shabbat services. We have already lost to the Nazis.)

We’re electing fascists to local, state and national office. Those officials are building concentration camps for asylum seekers, putting brown children in cages and adopting them out to white parents, inviting their supporters to commit acts of violence, breaking international treaties, throwing away environmental protections and engaging in corruption on a scale that would make the likes of Papa Doc and Idi Amin grow pale with envy. In short, Republicans at every level are feeling free to combine their two guiding principles of greed and cruelty into a unifying platform: making brutality a sustainable profit center. Goering and Goebbels are verklempt.

So, I still don’t know how much progress we’ve made since Kristallnacht. But perhaps it’s a start if we remember how it begins.