New Holocaust Stamps Project Collage
Recalls Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass
Three Grade 9 members of the FRCS Holocaust Remembrance Club have
begun work on a new stamps collage to commemorate Kristallnacht, the Night of
Broken Glass. This enormous, well-organized attack on Jews throughout the
German Reich occurred overnight on November 9, 1938, becoming 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.
The students’ art project is being undertaken to coincide with United
Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, 2013, the
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
Remembrance & Beyond.
Quite by chance, the first stamp the young FRCS artists chose to use, in
their Kristallnacht stamps collage, was issued by the United Nations in New York
in 1967. The oversized vertical stamp design is a photo of the brilliant
multicolored stained glass window by Jewish artist, Marc Chagall, which is
installed at the U.N. building to honor Nobel Peace prize winner, UN Secretary
General Dag Hammarskjold. The students cut the Chagall window stamp into
many pieces, and used them in the artwork to symbolize shards of shattered glass
from windows in two of the 267 torched synagogues of Germany, Austria and
other Nazi-controlled areas on November 9, 1938.
Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass is the sixth Holocaust Stamps Project
collage (in a series of 18 planned) assembled by Foxborough Regional Charter
School students.