November/December 2007 Feature

Remembrance of Kristallnacht; Shared Heritage

Editor’s Note: Kalman Sultanik was a guest speaker representing Holocaust survivors at an international conference that took place on July 2-4, 2007 at Auschwitz in Poland. The following essay includes that speech slightly revised. It is preceded by additional material on Kristallnacht to memorialize that tragic event, precursor of the Holocaust, for Midstream readers.

Next year we will commemorate 70 years since Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria. In the two-day rampage against the Jews, on November 9-10, 1938, Nazi thugs ransacked and set fire to synagogues, looted businesses, destroyed homes and robbed them of their possessions. Hundreds of Jews were terrorized, brutalized, killed, and wounded, and thousands more were rounded up to be sent to concentration camps.

Beyond the historical remembrance, Kristallnacht has become a symbol of the world’s indifference and silence, even to the point of belittling the Nazi danger. The publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1923 and his claim to the superiority of the German race was an omen of what was to overcome the Jews in particular and the free world in general.

Kristallnacht commemoration is intended to remind the world of today of the fateful pogroms in November 1938 in Nazi Germany. It should serve as a strong reminder that a similar type of threat in the form of global terror is emerging again 70 years later. Sadly enough, we are witnessing today manifestations of indifference, antisemitism, and xenophobia, with Iran leading the threat of a nuclear holocaust.

The Nurenberg Laws issued in 1935 demoted German Jews to citizens with fewer rights. They undid the emancipation of the Jews that began in Europe after the French Revolution and paved the way for the physical destruction of the Jewish minority. As of 1937, Jews could no longer earn a medical degree, doctors lost hospital privileges, and medical licenses were revoked. The same fate befell the Jewish lawyers and other professional groups, just to mention a few of the numerous legal and administrative decrees of discrimination that ultimately turned into lethal violence.

The pretext for the Kristallnacht pogrom was the attempt by seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan to assassinate Ernst vom Rath, an official in the German Embassy in Paris, who succumbed to his injuries on November 9, 1938. Young Herschel had intended this as an act of protest against the brutal deportation of 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship from Germany in October 1938. This incident coincided with the traditional annual celebration of the attempted Nazi putsch in 1923 and was considered the right moment to stage a pogrom, to be popularly referred to as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, a reference to the broken glass from the windows of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues that littered the streets). On the evening of November 9, Nazi party leaders were provoking violent revenge and retaliation against a whole people for a boy’s act. The order for a pogrom throughout Germany fulfilled in many party comrades a need for blood lust, murder, and destruction that had been dormant, and could now be publicly indulged in since it was officially sanctioned.

During the November pogrom, men and women of good will outside of Germany observed with disgust the violation of basic German virtues, such as respect for human life and private property, thrift, and respect for religious sites. The German Reich demonstrated to the world that it was no longer a civilized nation. The goal of the pogrom was not only the degradation of the Jewish minority, but also the destruction of property and the physical abuse of human beings. This outrage was compounded by the order for the incarceration of nearly 30,000 Jewish men in the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, which was intended to create pressure for emigration.

On November 12, 1938, Goering presided over a meeting of all Reich ministers and representatives of the insurance industry to discuss the aftermath of the pogrom. The expropriation of Jewish businesses and property was a foregone conclusion by this time. Hitler had already decided on a complete “Aryanization” of the German economy. The Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from German Economic Life destroyed livelihoods. Jews were barred from operating retail stores, and existing businesses were transferred to non-Jewish owners for a fraction of what they were worth. Jews were forced to sell all their jewelry and antiques for a pittance and were no longer permitted to own stocks or bonds, which were surrendered into compulsory custody accounts. Jewish real estate was also subject to forced “Aryanization.” Of 3,152 doctors, only 700 had permission to care exclusively for sick and dying Jewish patients throughout Germany.

With the banning of Jewish newspapers and organizations after the November pogrom, Jewish public life was shut down. Plundered and impoverished, Jews were left to their meager existence under increasingly dismal conditions, faced with ever new acts of harassment almost daily. By April 1939, The Law Regarding the Rental Conditions of the Jews called for assembling Jewish families into crowded apartments—“Jewish homes”—to facilitate supervision and later deportation. The official justification was that “Aryans” could not be expected to live in the same houses with Jews.

This was Kristallnacht and its immediate aftermath that should have shaken the rest of the world to its very foundations in 1938-39, but did not. It is now considered the precursor—nay the beginning—of the Holocaust.

Six million Jews, civilians all, one and one half million of them Jewish children, died in the gas chambers, in the furnaces, and before firing squads in enlightened Europe. But the Jewish nation survived to build a state—and to remember. *

My message is a simple one, but a crucial one: Mankind must be taught and reminded repeatedly of the horrendous tragedy of the Holocaust. For Jews, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp symbolizes the brutal destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest cemetery in the world without graves, a cemetery for approximately one and a half million people with no place to lay a stone or a flower in honor of dear ones. It is a cemetery without graves, because the bodies were blown into the sky as smoke.

The Holocaust victims bequeathed to us survivors, and all generations to come, the motto: “Do not forget, but remember.” Thus, we survivors will not forsake the memory of those who perished in the gas chambers of the concentration camps throughout Europe. We will not forget; we will remember.

The camps at Auschwitz first opened their gates in 1940 for Polish political prisoners. After the Nazi conquests in Europe, Auschwitz became international. It was only after the infamous Nazi conference at Wannsee on January 20, 1942, that the camp at Birkenau was constructed and designed to accommodate 100,000 prisoners and to contain four enormous installations of death, including gas chambers and crematoria. When Auschwitz-Birkenau became the center of the final solution of European Jewry in 1945, it also took over the extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek.

***

This impressive gathering of the International Academic Conference is not only to remember Auschwitz-Birkenau, but also every other camp and the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis throughout Europe. It is a testimony to the actuality of the crimes of the Third Reich for all succeeding generations to come. You walk down the steps of the crematorium, and you see and can easily identify with the hundreds of thousands of mostly Jewish men, women, and children who walked through here on the way to their death. You are confronted personally with the truth, the utter reality of the Shoah.

Memory is imposed on us as part of our homage to the victims of Nazism. If we fail to remember what happened here, their suffering and death will be meaningless. Through our efforts, we can keep the heritage of the victims alive.

In the death camps and on the death marches, strangers became friends. Those who were near death or about to be killed by the Nazis consistently told their fellow inmates, “Don’t forget me. Keep the memory alive.”

In Posen on October 4, 1943, before an assembly of high-ranking SS officers, Himmler said: “The killing of Jews is the most glorious page in our history, one not written and which shall never be written.” He asked his fellow murderers to carry this secret to the grave. Himmler tried to bestow on the German people the legacy to bury and not reveal the Nazi atrocities and the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish people. It is our responsibility to impress upon the German government, the German leaders, and the German people their responsibility to repeal and eradicate Himmler’s vow. All of us are now in a permanent race between the vow we made to those who begged us to tell their story and who died in the camps, and the vow the Nazis took never to reveal their unprecedented genocidal crime The German people must educate their future generations never to forget the darkest hour in their history, long after Holocaust survivors are gone. Germany can never be healed from the Holocaust, a stain it must bear for eternity

When Steven Spielberg planned to film his Schindler’s List, I objected to its being filmed on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, stressing that it was a desecration of the cemetery (Beit Kvarot). I also told Mr. Spielberg that unlike other cemeteries, the ground of Auschwitz-Birkenau is still covered with ashes from the bones of its victims. He then put his hand in the muddy swamp and pulled out fragments of human bones and said; “Now I realize that Auschwitz is no more than a huge open cemetery. There is no question of filming inside the camp. I am morally convinced not to film inside the camp.” And indeed, immediately afterwards, a special film set was built nearby, identical to the camp, and Schindler’s List was filmed there.

***

I would like to take the liberty of sharing with you my personal testimony and experience of the Holocaust and the death march in which I participated together with my brothers, the only survivors of the family who perished in the crematoria at Belzec.

As the shadow of Nazism and the war fell across Europe in the 1930’s, rumors were already circulating among the Jewish populace of my Polish hometown Miechow, of their imminent transportation to concentration camps. Thursday, September 2, 1942, was and has been the darkest day of my life. Just before dawn, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto of my hometown and ordered the entire Jewish population to assemble in the ghetto square within ten minutes. From there they marched us off to the railway station, where long rows of freight cars were waiting to transport us to concentration camps. Before boarding the trains, a process of selection took place, separating the young and able-bodied who were transported to the labor camp of Flashow, while the women, the aged, and the children were shipped to crematoria and gas chambers in Belzec.

My father and I were assigned to the able-bodied group. My father refused to desert his wife and two daughters and aggressively pushed me to the other side saying: “You are the eldest son; your two younger brothers are already in the labor camp. You must join them, and together you will help each other to survive.” My father chose to go to his death in Belzec as countless other Jews did, upholding their Jewish pride and dignity to the bitter end.

I have been living with this traumatic experience—of my separation from my family—for all of my life. Liberation from the concentration camps instilled in me a strong urge for survival so that I would be able to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities.

January 27, 1945, was not only the date of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was also a day when other camps were still under control of the Nazis. It was also the time when tens of thousands of camp inmates were forced to walk the death march. The Nazis were trying to escape the Russian liberators and move their prisoners to death camps with crematoria where they could be gassed quickly. The weak and those unable to walk—women, children, and elderly—were shot on the spot. Even though the Nazi defeat was imminent, they were determined to exterminate the remaining Jewish survivors.

After the liberation, my personal healing and capacity to move on with my life was made somewhat easier by immersing myself in the organization of the Displaced Persons (DP) camps of the refugee survivors from Poland, Eastern Europe, and Germany. They were all clinging to life and the Zionist promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, “Eretz Yisrael.” The United Nations delegation that came to the DP camps realized that the survivors would not consider returning to their old homes and countries of origin where they had suffered from antisemitism and rampant pogroms for centuries.

Yet, it is important to emphasize that no one could properly know Polish history without knowing the thousand years of intertwined Polish-Jewish history and the Jewish contributions to Polish society.

The determining factor in the survivors’ refusal to return to their countries of origin was the memory of scenes of indescribable horror that were perpetrated by the Nazis on European soil. But the most compelling reason was the survivors’ hope to settle in a sovereign and safe Israel on the soil of their ancient Jewish homeland.

We, the Holocaust survivors, have a particular obligation to carry on the legacy of remembrance and the commitments to create historical, educational, and cultural institutions that will preserve the heritage of our ancestors. Survivors’ testimonies will perpetuate the memory of the six million Jewish Shoah victims and their rich cultural heritage. We must ensure the collective public accountability to implement this legacy. Special accountability must be placed on the German people and their government to repent and atone for the sins of their ancestors.

Most of the concentration camps were built on Polish soil, but let us not forget that it had nothing to do with the Polish people. The Shoah was the diabolical plan orchestrated by the German Nazi regime. Therefore, Germany has the responsibility, both financially and morally, to assure the upkeep of these camps so that the museums and grounds can remain a permanent testimony to this tragic history, and to ensure that the Nazi plan—not only to annihilate the entire Jewish people, but also to eradicate Jewish history and culture—does not ever come to fruition.

This is not simply a pious hope. Nazi villainy did not succeed, thank God. But their evil designs still float in the air and poison it. This ceremony of remembrance, awareness, and responsibility must also proclaim that contemporary antisemites will never again be given the opportunity to carry out their current evil designs against the Jewish nation and against the civilized world.

***

The Jewish nation is not only an ancient nation, but also a nation of ongoing memory. If there is one trait that characterizes the Jewish nation, it is precisely the strength and tenacity of its memory. Keeping the memory alive brings to mind the words of the Baal Shem Tov, one of our great sages, the founder of Chasidism, who grew to greatness on Polish soil: “Forgetfulness leads to exile. The secret of redemption is remembrance.” •

About the author
kalman sultanik,a Holocaust survivor, represented the D.P. camps at the World Zionist Congress in 1946. He is currently a member of the Board of Govenors and Zionist Executive of the Jewish Agency and serves as Chairman of the WZO, American Section. He also sponsors Midstream.