Foxborough Regional Charter School
Holocaust Stamps Project
Stamps Collage #9 ‐ “Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass” This artwork commemorates Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, the well‐
organized November 9, 1938 overnight attack on Jews living under the rule of the Third Reich. It became the trigger event for the Holocaust in which six million Jews, and five million others considered to be “enemies of the State”, died as the victims of the Nazis’ atrocities against humanity. A small group of high school students worked on the collage for more than a year, beginning the week of United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, 2013, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz‐Birkenau concentration camp. [https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/]. The very first stamp the students used depicts a brilliant multicolored stained glass window created by Jewish artist, Marc Chagall and installed at the U.N. building to honor Nobel Peace prize winner, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. They used the cut‐up pieces of the Chagall stamp to symbolically represent the shattered windows in one of the 267 synagogues torched and destroyed during that night of destruction in Germany, Austria and other Nazi‐
controlled areas. Black empty spaces in the windows represent families who once lived together in peace, and hollow outlines of human figures honor the memories of those who were killed on the spot or marched off to a concentration camp. Also noteworthy is the image of a desecrated Torah scroll, ripped from the sacred sanctuary of the synagogue and disrespectfully unfurled in the street.