Sara Bortz – Year 11/12

Our High School commemoration of Kristallnacht focused on the theme of Open Hearts, Open Minds and Open Doors. Listening to accounts of those who experienced Kristallnacht, our students reflected on what we can learn from our past to help create a world that is open to all peoples and not closed off and silent to those in need.

Please click on the link below to hear our Head Madricha, Genevieve Goldman, accompanied by our Jewish Life Madrich, Gabriel Sebban, singing Eli Eli, by Hannah Szenes, at the High School Kristallnacht commemoration.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LXUUEspvtVXZDESX5CLTEy961sj1itWv/view?usp=sharing

Below are student reflections shared with their peers.

Rabbi Daniel Siegel

In the aftermath of the November 1938 ‘Night of Broken Glass’, thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. During my time in Poland earlier this year, I walked in some of these camps. While visiting camps where so many people died may seem too much to bear, these are places where the living still gather to learn and to remember. I wanted to go to bear witness to what our grandparents and great grandparents experienced. I wanted to see it for myself, not because I didn’t believe it, but because by acknowledging the wrongs that we as humans have allowed to occur, we will be a step closer to building the world that those who came before us could never imagine – the world in which the shaping of a collective moral compass comes before all other priorities. It is an obligation and also an honour, that we as the Jewish youth 70 years later be the ones who take the initiative to learn about, to mourn for and to remember those who lived during the Holocaust. And if we are to open our hearts in the hope that one day we will truly believe that hatred and hostility are a thing of the past, then we must all strive for justice, for fairness, equality and respect, for acceptance and celebration of difference, for altruism, compassion, kindness and giving.

Sara Bortz

Sonia Redman – Year 11/12

Kristallnacht marked a time of great loss for the Jewish people. The destruction of synagogues and other Jewish institutions and the burning of Jewish books and Torah scrolls signified not only the physical destruction of Jewish life in Germany, but was also largely indicative of the process of alienation and dehumanisation that was about to transpire.

In light of these tragic events, there remains a question: “What can we learn from this?”

To answer this, I want to draw your attention to a specific event that occurred years before Kristallnacht. In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on 10 May 1933, university students burned over 25,000 volumes of books deemed un-German, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. Eerily, among those works burned were the writings of German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who famously wrote: “Where they burn books they will also ultimately burn people.”

What I pose to you today, is that the Shoah began long before the events of Kristallnacht – that the physical manifestation of targeted violence against the minority Jews was preceded by years of intangible oppression, demagoguery and intellectual persecution. One can see in retrospect how the book burnings foreshadowed much more catastrophic Nazi plans for the Jews of Europe.

But why book burning?

There’s something uniquely symbolic about the burning of books. It goes beyond the censoring of beliefs and ideas. A book, plainly, is something more than ink and paper, and burning them means something more than destroying it by any other means.

The poet, philosopher and political theorist, John Milton, gives perhaps the best explanation of why authorities down the centuries have seen danger in certain books, and by extension, education. He wrote: “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are”.

The Nazi burnings of 1933, were essentially about announcing what would be acceptable in future, shaping the new public sphere. The burnings were the symbol; the repressive legislation and violence that came in their wake was what really enforced it. This official means of suppressing dissenting or heretical views foreshadowed the mass violence actively encouraged by Nazi leadership in a bid to purge the “un-German” spirit.

Why burning, though, rather than some other kind of destruction? The symbolism of flames is plain. Books are little encapsulations of human effort and wisdom and, I suppose, of our sense of history. So, to burn one of any kind, and certainly one that is a representation of a culture and set of beliefs, is to consign it to the flames of perdition.

Book-burning is first and foremost a monumental manifestation of intolerance. It is a base act of desecration. It is more than turning ink and paper to ash, but to show contempt for thought, to stifle dissent.

But, there remains a hope for the future. Yes, there is a sanctity attached to books, but in reality, they are merely objects. History has proven that those who try to destroy books and wipe out ideologies have failed. Ideas exist beyond the book. Blind writer Hellen Keller published an Open Letter to German Students following the Nazi Book Burnings. She wrote: “You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on”.

The book burnings, and Kristallnacht, may have been the ignition of flames of racial hatred that swept across the continent, for the violence and destruction that was to ensue. But, though vast numbers of books were destroyed, thousands of properties demolished, and eventually, six million Jewish people senselessly slaughtered, we still stand here.

Hellen Keller wrote: “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them”.

Sonia Redman