Accompanying Texts
Josef Wisnia (1934-2020) Letters Soaring on Kristallnacht, 1989
Fishel Rabinowicz (b. 1924) Biography (of Survivors), 1994
Accompanying Texts
Josef Wisnia (1934-2020) Letters Soaring on Kristallnacht, 1989
Fishel Rabinowicz (b. 1924) Biography (of Survivors), 1994
The following texts, which include excerpts from original testimonies, have been collated for individual and collective use. They describe the savagery and despoilment experienced by the Jews during the November Pogrom ("Kristallnacht"), and reflect their terror and utter helplessness in the course of this violent rampage.
"On the night between 9 and 10 November 1938, an anti-Jewish pogrom was perpetrated in Germany in accordance with Nazi party orders and with the participation of Nazi forces. In the course of the rampage, hundreds of synagogues were set on fire, 7,500 Jewish stores and private houses were ransacked, 91 Jews were murdered and some 26,000 were sent to concentration camps. Shards of glass were strewn all over the streets, hence the pogrom's better-known name: "Kristallnacht". […] In essence, this was the climax of a process that had been planned months earlier with the seamless cooperation of the government, the party and the economic authorities. […] Their goal was to destroy the very possibility of Jewish financial existence in Germany. […] [The Jews] were alienated from every communal framework, ranging from schools to theaters. […] The German Jews' emigration plans were transformed into an emergency bolt for freedom."
From the film, "What Happened in the November Pogrom?", part of a study program for the 2023 history matriculation examination. Producer: Yad Vashem, Israel, 2020
"To burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity… God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At the time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a concordat, with the enemies of Christ (Hitler and the Pope signed a concordat on July 20, 1933), when the Protestants are establishing a 'German Church' and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European cultures, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture… This Third Reich is only the beginning of the end! By destroying the Jews they are persecuting Christ. For the first time the Jews are not being murdered for crucifying Christ but for having produced him from their midst. If the books of Jewish or supposedly Jewish authors are burned, what is really set fire to is the book of books: the Bible."
Confino, Alon. "A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide", Yale University Press 2014, P. 54
"No one stopped the destruction… a middle-aged man had come across a tool box. He was stuffing all his pockets, pressed a brand new hammer into my hand. At first I just played with the hammer. Without paying attention I swung it loosely from my wrist, back and forth, back and forth. At one point I must have nicked something—glass crashed at my blow. I jumped. The glass had belonged to a bookcase. But almost at once my curiosity awoke. Gently I tapped a cracked pane of glass and it fell out of its frame. By now I was enjoying myself. I swung so hard against the third pane that its splinters fell in bursts to the floor.
With my hammer I cut myself a path through the corridors, smashing aside whatever barred my way: legs of chairs, toppled wardrobes, chamber pots and glassware. I felt so strong! I could have sung I was so drunk with the desire to swing my hammer."English: Richter, Hans Peter. "Friedrich", Edite Kroll (Translator), Puffin books – Penguin Books, 1987, pp. 91-92
German source: Richter, Hans Peter. "Damals war es Friedrich: Roman", dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 1979
"At 7 PM we were sitting down, and stones suddenly came crashing in through the windows and blinds. People who had been mobilized—we couldn't see them—hurled stones inside. There was a telephone in the adjacent room, so we called the police. We didn't understand what was going on… Nobody knew. We rang the police, saying: 'We are being attacked; they are throwing stones at us!' So they told us to run upstairs […] and they said that they would come. That was the end of it. At that moment, the electricity and telephone lines were cut. It was all so organized, everything had been prepared. They cut us off, so we didn't have electricity or a working telephone. We ran upstairs, but since they knew exactly what our escape options were, stones started flying up there too […] until after an hour or two, I don't remember exactly, there was a knock at the door. We asked: 'Who's there?' They replied: 'Police!' We opened the door, two policemen came in and said to my mother and my aunt: 'You know what, if you have money the rabble will take it away from you. Give us the money, we'll give you a receipt, and you can get it back whenever you want."
From the testimony of Avraham ben Moshe,Yad Vashem Archives O.3_12613
"Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the effects to the streets, the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight."
Reported by David H. Pam, American Consul in Leipzig
Gilbert, Martin. "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007, p. 87
"In local communities, in the meantime, burning the Bible was celebrated as a new German identity. The small, disbanded Jewish community in Ratzenburg, Pomerania, sold the local synagogue before November 1938, and it was made into an egg market. As Kristallnacht came, and hundreds of localities across Germany burned synagogues, some inhabitants in Ratzenburg protested. They also wanted a synagogue to burn, for what was a locality without a burned synagogue? This was akin to not taking part in the new national history. The local Jewish community was thus forced to annul the sale and return the money. The eggs were removed, the synagogue was restored, and Ratzenburgers set their synagogue on fire."
Confino, Alon. "A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide", Yale University Press 2014, p. 141
"I turned towards the synagogue. In front of the synagogue, members of the Hitler Youth were standing and playing tug-of-war with the Torah scrolls… They are made of parchment, and the sheets of parchment are sewn together… They were playing tug-of-war! I knew that there was a side entrance to the synagogue courtyard. I knew about the side entrance, and I went inside in order to try and retrieve my father's prayer shawl."
From the testimony of Meir Yitzhak Felix, Yad Vashem Archives O.3_12008
"On Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, when Rabbi Carlebach heard that the Nazis had set Hamburg's main synagogue on fire, he raced to the synagogue and entered via a side entrance in order to save the Torah scrolls. He approached the Nazis and begged them relinquish the Torah scrolls, saying: 'After all, the Bible is sacred to you too!' They responded by beating him savagely. It was a miracle that he got away."
Da'at Encyclopedia, Herzog College for Judaic Studies
"A crowd had gathered when I spotted a man with a beard whom I recognized as our gabbai, the rabbi's assistant. When I cast a friendly glance at him this was apparently intercepted by two Gestapo agents who ordered us to follow them. These two would-be agents were hardly older than myself. And I dared to ask them what I had done. One of them answered in a gruff voice, 'You will find out!' When we got to the police courtyard there were other Jewish prisoners. Some showed marks of being beaten. A police spokesman then said we were there because of what had happen in Paris. Nothing would happen to us if we were to cooperate, and it was all for our own protection."
Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007, P. 83
״I think that until 1938 my parents never thought of leaving Germany. [...] That was the heart of the problem of German Jewry: It was so much a part assimilated of German society that the Nazi blow hit them from within. [...] There’s no way the Germans we live with will continue to do these things. It’s only an episode, That was the atmosphere. It was also the atmosphere on Kristallnacht. They couldn't comprehend it. It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying. I remember her phoning her gentile friends - she had more gentile friends than Jewish friends - No answer. No one answered her."
Testimony of Zwi Bachrach from the film: " German-Jewish life on the Eve of WWII", Director: Reuven Haker, Israel 2005
"I was walking, a boy, eleven years old, and I approached the area of the shops. Somehow, I smelled something burning. It was very odd. I didn't know where it was coming from. I feel chaos and screaming. I get closer and closer and see... the men in the yellow shirts, the SA early Nazi paramilitary wing, they're storming the shops, breaking the windows and the crowd around them is standing and watching. I join the crowd, stand among the crowd and see what's going on. I couldn't move. They smashed the windows, they removed all the goods from inside and threw them out onto the street. They grabbed a poor man in one of the shops and nearly killed him. And I keep walking, I approach the big synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. It was the crowning glory of synagogues. They wanted to burn down the synagogue and the firefighters put out the fire. I see this and can't stay there any longer. I run home, shaking all over, my entire body, crying, making sure no one is running after me. I get home, I burst out in tears and cry out to my mother: 'Mother, Mother, they're destroying everything and burning everything down.' It was horrible. How does this make a child feel? An eleven-year-old Jewish boy who sees this, what does he think? What can he think? How can he understand why they are doing this? How can he even understand the world? [...] We were persecuted everywhere. [...] What I perceived in all of this was my parents' helplessness. The helplessness of the Jews in general, the helplessness of the community."
Testimony of Zvi Aviram Abrahamsohn from the film: "My Rebellion: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Zvi Aviram", Director: Tsvi Nevo, Israel 2019, produced by Yad Vashem
"As we walked up the three flights of stairs, we had to carefully pick our way on the stone steps to avoid stepping on glass and pieces of wood. And chaos confronted us when we opened our front door. In the spacious vestibule, three of the four doors to the two large yellowish oak linen closets were open. The closets had been emptied. Behind the still-closed fourth door, a few apparently forgotten older pieces of bed linen remained. Broken glass and broken dishes were strewn everywhere, and silver utensils and candlesticks were missing from their customary place in the dining room cabinet. The furniture in the study, the room directly opposite the front door, had been methodically hacked to pieces. Hebrew books, their pages torn, were everywhere on the floor. Many of these were the Hebrew prayer books for the sabbath and the different holidays, and Father began to pick them up as he was stumbling over them: according to Jewish law and custom, Hebrew prayer books and texts, which usually include the name of God, are not supposed to lie on the floor. In the vestibule, the cabin trunk that had held linen bought for Grete's planned emigration lay empty. Dumbfounded, afraid to move, Mother and the three of us just stood there."
Gilbert, Martin. "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007, pp. 90-91
"Many storefronts had been reduced to rubble, and it was clear that all those were Jewish stores. My uncle sold feathers for pillows and quilts. Next to his store was a Jewish liquor store. As I approached them, I saw feathers swirling in the air, feathers glued to the street where they had mixed with the wine flowing from the liquor store. Broken bottles were lying about; one could imagine that the best of the wines had been plundered, while some broke in the process of destroying the store. After that experience I had had enough, and turned to return home. The picture was the same: SS men leading Jews who followed them as innocent lambs. My mood changed from feeling adventurous to crestfallen. The harsh reality of what had happened, and what still might happen, began to sink in. By the time I reached our apartment, my family had heard the reason for the attack on Jews and their property. From that point on life changed for me. I had but one goal, to leave Germany."
Gilbert, Martin. "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 200, p. 81
"It is now six-thirty and I can hardly think clearly. What happened to us Jews in Germany since four-thirty this morning is indescribable. In the whole of Germany there exists no synagogue that is not burned or still burning, there are no more store windows that are not broken."
From a letter by Eugen Lehmann
Gilbert, Martin. "Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007, pp. 51
"To see our synagogues going up in flames, to see owners of Jewish stores walking in front of them with signs on their back: "I am ashamed to be a Jew" while their stores were robbed, was frightening and heartbreaking. It was not only their stores being broken in, it was lives being broken…"
From the testimony of Brunia Shwebel
Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007, p. 53
"Jewish life in Vienna came to a virtual end with the destruction of the many magnificent temples in the Leopoldstrasse, Tempelgasse, Grosse Schiffgasse and so many others. I'll always cherish the memory of Vienna prior to the Nazi Anschluss and the memory of my parents who saw the successful emigration of their six children. They were deported to the East in 1942. They did not survive."
From the testimony of Felix Rinda
Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction", Harper Perennial 2007 p. 60
Asia Publishers
Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism
Da'at Encyclopedia, Herzog College for Judaic Studies
Harper Perennial
Penguin Books
Yad Vashem
Yale University Press
Yedioth Books
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