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THE LESSONS OF KRISTALLNACHT
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Wednesday night, as we have just heard, will be Egg! figgflIChodesh, inaugurating
the new month of KislevCtch will bring us to Chanukkah, the Feast of Lighg]. But
it will also be the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 'Night of the Broken
Glass', bringing back painful memoriesigo all of us, and especially to those of us
who lived through iti] But for many of us these memories are[§ased only on what we
have read, and ar§1beginning to fade, and many of us are reluctanté or disinclined:1
to subject ourselves yet again to the pain of remembrance.
Which is why, when we
considered whether we should hold a special commemorative[§ervice ofilmeeting on the
actual night of the anniversary, we decided that, on balance, it would be better
not to do so, lest the numbers attending-should\§Epfiiafi;cl-{hé'bfipSe 6f the e;3r¥/”
\\61$e,rfiyt ogly’té‘do wfig} allZ§yhagqgfie§lhaQEifieei:§sk§g'jomdg, whiph_ig to keep AK
ifiéir giéhté;::;ggng Zhfiéugfi:EEEffii§pi gs é gihbéi‘o§_re%embrance.
But all the moré 35 it incumbent on us, I am surévyou will all agree, that we
should do a little remembering this morning.
Not that remembering is an end in
itself. [it‘fls hardly possible to mention today's date without recalling the
anonymous rhyme:
Please to remember
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
We~know no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
But the rhyme states no positive reason why the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 should be
remembered.
No doubt one could think up such a reason.
It might be, for instance,
to impress on our minds the need to be vigilant against arsonists, or else to accord
fair treatment to Catholics.
But
I
doubt whether either of these thoughts will
heavily on the minds of the kindlers of bonfires and fireworks tonight. It will
be a harmless celebration - provided that due care is taken - but also a largely
meaningless and purposeless one.
Kristallnacht is differentil In remembering it, and the Holocaust which it
prefigured, we have a very serious purpose indeed: not only to remember the victims,
but to ask ourselves what obligations flow from it for us. What, in other words,
are the lessons of Kristallnacht?
But just before we do so, since, as
That is the question we must ponder this.morning.
have said, memories have begun to fade, let
us briefly recall what actually happened.
I
[}t was not, of course, the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi
COLLEGE
LEO BAECK
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Germany.
Far from it!
Already for four long years they had been systematically
slandefied, insulted and humiliated, deprived of political rights and economic
opportunities.
There had been many ihstances of Jewish property being vandalised,
and at least two, in Munich and Nuremberg, of synagogues being burnt down. Many
thousands of Jews had already emigrated, and hundreds had committed suicide. But
what happened fifty yearé ago marked a pew stage in the implementation of Hitler's
plot against us.
I
Towards the end of October 18,000 Jews who held Polish passports were deported
to the German-Polish border, refused admission into Poland, and’héqg {Bgefihégfiii‘
appallingly overcrowded and filthy makeshift accommodation. One of them, Zindel
Grynszpan, who, though born in Poland, had lived most of his life in Hanover, sent
a postcard to his sonfhirsch OEJHirschel, who was a student in Paris, describing
the conditions.
He, enraged, stormed into the German Embassy on 6th November and
shot an embassy official, Ernst vom Rath, wfio died two or three days later. Then,
02 the pretéxt of vengeance, the Nazis unleashed a well-planned and orchestrated
peogrom against the Jews of Greater Germany, which by then included Austria. The
\/
Daily Telegraph reported what had happened£§n the night of 9th—10th Novembefl:
The entire Jewish population of Germany was subjected to a reign of terror.
The pogroms started simultaneously all over Germany. No attempt was made by
the police to restrain the savagery of the mob. Almost‘every synagogue was
burnt to the ground. Scarcely a Jewish shop escaped being wrecked. Looting
occurred on a great scale. Parts of the fashionable district of Berlin were
reduced to a shambles. Jews of all ages, of both sexes, were beaten in the
streets and in their homes. (Quoted in A Century of Jewish Life by I. Elbogen, p. 663f)
What that brief report failed to mention,{bresumablilbecause it was not yet
known, is that on the following day 30,000 Jews (including my father) were arrested
by the Gestapo and despatched to concentration camps.
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K gatesxunden~pol¢ce~escort\fnomoBerlinr~ At~the~gates; the police*wefie made to
hand them over to an SS unit; The sixty—two Jews were then forced to run a
gauntlet of spades, clubs and whips. Accordingg to an eye-witness, the police,
'unable to bear their cries, turned their backs'. As the Jews were beaten,
they fell. As they fell they were beaten further. This 'orgy' of beating
lasted half an hour. When it was over, )twelve of the sixty—two were dead,
their skulls smashed. The others were all unconscious. The eyes of some had
been knocked out, their faces flattened and shapeless.‘ (p. 74)
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And now, with that to remind us gruesomely what Krisgallnacht was and what it
portended, let us turn to the all-important question: What is there to be learnt
from the remembrance of it?
The answer is so obvious that one hesitates to mention it.
But whether self—
evident or not, it is true, and just about the most important of all truths.
It
is that those of us who know about it, whether first—hand, second—hand or third—
hand, have by virtue of that fact a solemn obligation to do whatever lies in our
power to ensure that nothing like it shall ever happen again to our people or to
any group of human beings, whether its defining characteristic be race or nation-
ality or religion or political ideology or any other. But what does that entail?
Four things, let we suggest, and all of them follow from the causes of what happened.
The single most important fact about the perpetrators of the Holocaust is that
Therefore what they did demonstrates that
human beings are capable of unspeakable cruelty. Nevertheless, human beings don't
ordinarily behave like that, but only when the aggressive and sadistic element in
they were human beings like you and me.
There—
fore Lesson Number One of Kristallnacht is that we must discipline ourselves to refrain from making remarks about any human group which are liable to stir up hatred
their make-up is aroused from its slumber and fanned into a ferocious hatred.
against them; and therefore we had better search our hearts and ask ourselves whether
we have ever made such remarks about Christians or Muslims, Irish or Palestinians,
Tories or Socialists, Gypsies or Homosexuals, and if we have, solemnly resolve
never to do so again.
But it is not only cruelty, born of hatred, Which made the Holocaust possible.
It was also callousness, born of indifference, first on the part of Germans, Austrians,
Poles and other Central European fiations with a strong tendency towards Antisemitism,
and secondly on the part of the world at large.
I
shall never forget the words of
the teacher of my class at the Jewish school in Berlin with which she dismissed
those of us who had made our way there on the morning after Kristallnacht. "Up to
now," she said, "the Great Powerskficgiooked on silently.
Now, you may be sure,
they will take action."
Well, they didn't, or not very much.
On the contrary, the ineffectiveness of
the international conference held at Evian, in Switzerland, in July '38, to consider
I
the admission of refugees from Nazi Germany, as well as the British Prime Minister
Chamberlain's agreement with Hitler and Mussolini at Munich in September that year,L
ih0c*o if
and the world's passivity in the face of the Nazis' annexation of the SudetenlandL—
all these signs of a lack of will-power did much to embolden Hitler to go ahead
with his devilish plans.
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And after Kristallnacht, what did the West do?
Protests appeared in the press.
Demonstrations were held in New York and elsewhere. The House of Commons passed
a resolution expressing horror and sympathy. The British Government decided to
admit ten thousand German Jewish children, provided the refugee organisations would
guarantee to maintain them - a concession for which several of us have personal
reasons to be grateful
—
but on the other hand enforced more strictly the terms
ofi:thé L)White‘Paper restricting the entry of Jewish refugees into Palestine.
Many opportunities to restfiain Hitler, and to rescue his victims, were deliberately
On the whole the response of the world to the Holocaust was so inadepassed off.
quate as to justify the title of a recent book on the subject, by David S. Wyman:
The Abandonment of the Jews.
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’hi§lp§9ple. Befgre he did sp, he_yrq§§ an Oggnetter,inr ghnew York Times to
the President of the Polish Government—in—Exile, in which he said:
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The responsibility for the crime of murdering all the Jewish population in
Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it
weighs heavily on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the
Allied States which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the
purpose of curtailing the crime. By passive observation of this murder of defenseless millions and the maltreatment of children and women, the men of those
countries have become accomplices of criminals. (Rafi RLMexEs4ULhrandJehxh
ReiNar‘z, The Jew in the Modem World, p. 512.)
The second lesson of Kristallnacht, therefore, is that we should make a solemn
resolve never to commit the sin of indifference when any people, on our doorstep
or far away, is subjected to persecution, let alone genocide, lest we become
'accomplices of criminals'.
But it was not only hatred and indifference towards Jews which made the Holocaust
possible.
It was also the abandonment by Nazi Germany of a whole, distinctive,
organised political philosophy and tradition, that of liberalEsm andjdemocracy,
and its replacement by a fascist dictatorship. And therefore our third duty,
arising out of our remembrance of Kristallnacht, is to do all we can to defend,
maintain and strengthen the forces of liberalism, and to be very much on our guard
against any tendency to belittle it or to undermine it, and to veer away from it
towards any new totalitarianism of the Right or of the Left.
But it isn't only political ideologies which influence the minds of human
beings and ultimately shape the policies of nations. It is also religious
ideologies. Judaism i§“such a? idqology, and one which teaches the very values
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which must be cultivated if there are to be no more holoéausts: a deep respect for
the sanctity Of human life and for the dignity of every human being, created in
God's image, and a constant striving for justice, compassion and peace. And therefore those of us who are Jews - provided that we are not conscientiously unable to
continue to give our allegiance to Judaism — are obligated to do just that, and to
strengthen it in every way we can.
Your rabbis have this week attended a conference in Oxfordshire on intermarriage
at which the question naturally arose, whether there is a positive obligation to
perpetuate Judaism.
When
I
suggested that there was, and that it was reinforced
by the Holocaust, the suggestion, at least the latter half of it, was immediately
contested by some of my colleagues as 'emotional blackmail'. Is it? Yes, if Judaism
had no intrinsic value, then to tell young people that they must preserve it merely
out of lpyalty to their ancestors who died because of Eflglg loyalty to it, would be
emotional blackmail.
Bdt if Judaism has merits, and possibly even merits essential
to the well—being of humanity, then surely there g§ an‘gbligation on those who are
Jews at any rate to g9 Egg}: §g§£ to perpetuate it, and then surely it gg reinforced
by the Holocaust.
Not indeed by the Holocaust alone.
The Holocaust is only the
most recent episode of a history in which the survival of our people has often
hung by a thin thread. It was so from the beginning, and our Torah portion is an
illustration of it. It is about continuity: the continuity of the Jewish enterprise which depends precariously on Eliezer's mission to find a suitable wife for
Isaac. The mission is successful. Isaac marries Rebekah, and their son Jacob be—
comes the progenitor of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
So, too, in every age there is only a finite number of Jews who can ensure the
continuity of Judaism, and therefore we who are, all of us, directly or indirectly,
survivors of the latest and most brutal attempt in all of history to destroy that
continuity, surely we must take on ourselves a special responsibility to ensure
that what Hitler tried to bring about by design shall not come about by neglect.
If these responsibilities mean nothing to us, then indeed there is no point in
tbhmemoréfiing Kbiétallnacht. But if the remembrance impresses them fipon us with
renewed force; théfi Ehét is its justification, because it will have inspired us to
make our little contribution to the coming of the day when swords will be beaten
into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks, and holocausts will be no more.
JdYID. Rnner
Sabum anyww $flah
5th November, 1988
LJS,St.Jdm'sWoxL bxflon
4
IN REMEMBRANCE OF ISRAEL'S SUFFERING, pp. 289-290, then straight to p. 367.
'
BEFORE KADDISH
‘
We express our sympathy to those of our members who have come here today weighed
down with sorrow for loved ones who have diedL..;.......and we say to them:
Ha-Makom y‘nachem... And we associate ourselves with those who remémber lovéd
ones who died at this time of the year in years gone by, among them..........
as well as Malcolm Slowe, founder of our Israel Society, President of the Union
of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues, and a leading personality in the Board of
With his family, and with all
the other families, we give thanks f0} their lives and say zichronam livrachah.
Deputies of British Jews, who died a year ago.
More generally, on this Shabbat, we remember with special poignancy all those
of our people who suffered and died fifty years ago on Kristallnacht and in
May our remembrance of them
spur us to renew our efforts to establish on this our planet a just, compassionate
the still more terrible events which followed it.
and humane society.
God is our hope.1.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
We have spoken of discontinuity, the discontinuity of tragedy and death.
But
there is continuity, too. Among others, there is Continuity in the slowe
family, and
I
wéuld like to take this opportunity to congratulate Peter Slowe
and his wife Karen on the birth of their son Alastair who was recently circumsised and who will bear the Hebrew name of his grandfather, Elimelech.
I
also
draw your attention to the announcements...and especially the one relating to
Miss Hannah Feldman, one of our flost faithful members, whom we all congratulate
and wish well on the occasion of hér ninetieth birthday, which she is celebrating
today.