Kristallnacht: The Night of Shattering Glass, 9 November 1938

The Night of The Shattering Glass, otherwise known as Kristallnacht, took place November 9, 1938, marking to that date, the most widespread attack against Jews in peacetime Germany and Austria.

In France, two days prior, a 17 year old Jew had shot a German embassy staffer in retaliation for the egregious treatment of his father and family at the hands of Nazis in Germany.

Hitler seized on that event as opportunity to enact his long planned desire to destroy Jewish houses of worship and the Jews…. parnasah, their ability to make a living.

Thus, on that night, Hitler unleashed his most psychopathic and hate-gorged minions to loot and burn any and every Jewish community in Nazi territory. 267 synagogues were plundered of sacred Torah scrolls, the hand-built temples torched.

100 Jews were murdered whilst trying to defend family and property. 7500 Jewish shops were looted of valuables, left with every window shattered and all remaining fixtures despoiled and set afire.

The Nazi government said the Jews had brought this down upon their own heads, and ordered them to pay one billion marks for the murder of the Embassy staffer in Paris.

The Jews were also charged six million marks to pay for the Nazi’s destruction of their own shops.

Shortly afterward, 25,000 Jewish fathers, rabbis, brothers, sons, students, poets, farmers, sweethearts, and bridegrooms, were dragged from their families, farms, and off the streets.

They were forced to Nazi slave camps, never to be seen again. It was the commencement of an ancient evil, but on a new, relentless scale.

The Nazi plan: To extinguish entire cultural groups, but first to coerce them to become a wage-less workforce for the state’s purposes, until these innocents, unable to work any longer because of starvation and torture, were murdered where they lay.

Near Oswiecim Poland, the Nazis ordered more heatless barracks and factory halls built. Less than eighteen months after Kristallnacht, this death camp, called Auschwitz, was fully packed with blameless souls who were rendered into a river of blood. This flood of humanity was bled out day and night without cease for the next four years.

Kristallnacht stands as one of the central flashpoints… one so large that for those who had the eyes or heart to see it, it could be registered around the world. It was Kristallnacht that catalyzed the Nazi’s spreading stain across Europe and Russia.

The sick psychological ideas underlying the arsons of Kristallnacht leapt from dry mind to dry mind until the malicious ideas caught on that mental tinderwood in each man’s darkest mind, and there, broke into flame, fueling ever more death.

By 1938, Dachau had already been rendering human bones and blood for six years. Now were added six more houses of slaughter in Poland alone, including Auschwitz.

In the years prior, Hitler had ordered Germany’s doctors to euthanize tens of thousands of German children, Jews and non-Jews alike, who were in some way lame or halt, and that ‘operation’ was carried out in full, emptying sanitoriums and orphanages even as many German physicians protested vociferously.

But, death and disposal of ‘inconvenient humans’ had become not only the pattern of the collective unconscious of a nation, but an insatiable hunger. The legends of the vampire do not spring up from a soul being lost.

The oldest vampire legends spring up around those who have murdered, and thereby a ’switch has been thrown’ in them; they developed a blood lust to murder more, to see, taste, smell blood again and again. And to recruit others to be blood seekers, like themselves.

And so, at the end of the war, as Allied soldiers approached in vehicles and on foot, the Nazi guards and officers could not resist final vampiric acts: destroying, shooting, executing and burning people, buildings, corpses, and records. All this, before the Nazis, like the monsters in the ancient sagas, fled into the woods surrounding… seeking cover of night…. and avoiding day.

However, many of the Nazis’ had obsessively kept ledgers. Many f these and the Nazis’ thousands of photographs of what they’d done and to whom, survived. These papers revealed that more than 2.5 million souls had been purposefully maimed and murdered at Auschwitz, most of them Jews… thereby adding to the more than six million Jews slain during Hitler’s reign.

Over a million Rom gypsies, people who were homosexual, persons who were activists, industrialists, political party members, teachers, holy people, Russian prisoners of war, Christians, and ill persons of any background, were murdered also.

The Nazis, so star struck with their co-opted symbols of swastikas, death’s heads and lightening bolts, thus had attempted to murder of ‘The Soul of the World’ by murdering over 8 million of its most soulful people.

Yet, like any people decimated, even if there are but a handful left, like the great rebbe Bal Shem Tov taught: a person might forget the place to stand in the forest to speak to God, might forget the words to the prayer, might forget just how to light the ceremonial fire, but…

well, here is the story from one of my books: it is not about how everything will work out all right for the Jews of that time. It can hardly be said that anything worked out alright for near anyone in the blood of WWII then. So, this is not a story about forgetting; it is a simple story about a complicated thing; if I could put it this way… keeping Faith with the Fathomless no matter what:
Listen…

“This old tale was handed down to me in many different versions over many an evening fire. The tellers were various good and rustic people from Eastern Europe, most of whom still lived by the oral tradition.

“The beloved Bal Shem Tov was dying and sent for his disciples.
“I have acted as an intermediary for you, and now when I am gone you must do this for yourselves. You know the place in the forest where I call to God? Stand there in that place and do the same. You know how to light the fire, and how to say the prayer. Do all of these and God will come.”

“After the Bal Shem Tov died, the first generation did exactly as he had instructed, and God always came.

“But by the second generation, the people had forgotten how to light the fire in the way the Bal Shem Tov had taught them. Nevertheless, they stood in the special place in the forest and they said the prayer, and God came.

“By the third generation, the people had forgotten how to light the fire, and they had forgotten the place in the forest. But they spoke the prayer, nevertheless, and God still came.

“In the fourth generation, everyone had forgotten how to build the fire, and no one knew any longer knew just where in the forest one should stand, and finally too, the prayer itself could not be recalled.

“But one person still remembered the story about it all, and told it aloud.

“And God still came. . . .”

©1993, All Rights Reserved: Excerpt from The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What is Enough by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes; Ballantine/ Bertelsmann USA, Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain, Holland, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, France, Spain, South Africa.