German-born Polish – Jewish expatriate named Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot and killed Nazi German Diplomat, Ernst Von Rath in cold blood in his office in Paris, France. Grynszpan had a troubled youth. He was known to have a violent temper. The reason for his brutal crime was supposedly in revenge for the Nazis’ decree stripping Polish Jews of their citizenship and the Gestapo’s rounding up and deporting over 12,000 Polish Jews – including Herschel’s parents.
Hitler used the murder of Von Rath as a pretext to attack the entire Jewish communities of Germany and Austria. On November 9th, 1938, organized groups of Nazi thugs burned synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and broke into the homes of Jewish residences and brutally arrested thousands of Jewish men throughout the Third Reich – sending them to newly-built concentration camps. This night, now known as Krystalnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass – because of the glass that littered the streets following the pogrom), was the beginning of the Final Solution for European Jewry. In the days and weeks that followed, the rest of the world remained silent – giving Hitler a green light to carry out his horrific plans.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Grynszpan in the aftermath of the murderous attack on National Guard troops in Washington, DC by an Afghan national this past week. President Trump, in response to this horrific event has called for collective punishment for all Afghani asylum seekers and the curtailing of visas from all “Third World Countries.” History has taught us that blaming entire groups of people in response to the act of individuals is a tool of authoritarian governmental control. This tragic event in our nation’s capital is being exploited to justify immoral, xenophobic and racist policies and further an agenda of intolerance and bigotry that must be called out and condemned.
The world remained silent after Krystalnacht. We know what followed in its wake. Silence is complicity my friends. We cannot allow history to repeat itself.
