Sudden catastrophe
The destruction and terror would later be recognised as the harbinger of the Shoah.
On November 9-10, we observe the 86th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 (euphemistically dubbed Kristallnacht by the Nazis), a state pogrom in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. The destruction and terror would later be recognised as the harbinger of the Shoah.
As special visitor Dani Dayan of Yad Vashem will retell in Melbourne, the Night of Broken Glass saw 267 synagogues burned and looted, over 7000 businesses damaged or destroyed, and around 30,000 Jewish men taken to concentration camps.
It had only been a short route to Kristallnacht from the Evian Conference some months earlier, at which the West wanted no significant involvement in the intake of Jewish refugees from Germany. Adolf Hitler recognised that the abandoned Jews of Germany – and later Europe – were his to destroy.
It was only a short leap from Kristallnacht to Wannsee, the demonic 1941 Nazi conference at which the eradication of European Jewry was blueprinted.
Again it was a short rail journey from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. Between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews perished in Treblinka’s gas chambers. Many of those transported were from the Warsaw Ghetto.
This month, Australia will become the first country outside Europe to host an exhibition of the Ringelblum Archive. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian, gathered a small group of volunteers in a clandestine project to document the depravity of their Nazi overlords. They collected everything from typewritten eyewitness reports, to Nazi public notices, even children’s drawings and sweet wrappers. They hid their collection in containers discovered after the war.
The Ringelblum Archive will be accessible at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s exhibition, Underground: The Hidden Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto.
It’s a thought for sleepless nights – but sometimes history lunges along the short route. There’s a pivot and we’re on seismic terrain. Who could have predicted Kristallnacht? Who could have conceived of the murder of six million Jews? And who could have imagined 13 months ago how an October morning would transform Israel and the Diaspora?
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