My grandfather, Samson Hochfeld, one of Berlin's senior rabbis, had been dead for 17 years and did not see the mindless attack on his elegant synagogue in the Fasanenstrasse on that night, November 9th, 1938. Nor the wave of well-orchestrated destruction and killing across Germany, known as the infamous Kristallnacht, literally "The Night of Broken Glass." Synagogues and businesses owned by Jewish merchants were targets, tens of thousands were arrested and deported, dozens killed.
The response? Almost none. Germany's Nazi government took the world's silence for tacit approval, and the worst genocide in modern European history began.
Paris, no stranger to its share of the blame (the vélodrome at Drancy serving as a reminder of French complicity in the deportation of Jews), has in recent years established museums and memorials to give witness to the past. A four-month exhibit about Kristallnacht opened today at the Holocaust Museum, Mémorial de la Shoah, in the Marais.
Just as we marvel that it's been 45 years since MLK's March on Washington, we reflect as well on the unspeakable that took place 70 years ago.
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