In commemoration of Kristallnacht, on Nov 10th 2021, a group of Yale Students gathered at the Anderson Mansion for a screening of the Documentary film The Night of Broken Glass. Professor Jason Stanley opened the evening with personal remarks of his own German Jewish family’s experience in 1938 in Nazi Germany.
Following the screening, each student remarked personally on the lessons of Kristallnacht vowing to prevent a reoccurrence of such horror. The following open-mic footage evidences deep reflection by our best and brightest as the tempest of Anti-Semitism surges around the globe, conspicuously reminiscent of the antecedent to the Holocaust.
Yale Reflects on Kristallnacht
-
Professor Jason Stanley: So, my family is here, and that's my youngest son. He's six. And he's about six months older than my father was on Kristallnacht when my father was in Berlin on this day. My father remembers being in the back of Gustaf Gründgens Gestapo command car. That's the family story, so, he was Gustav Grundgens, the movie Mephisto was about him. He was a German actor who became the head, was sort of given prominence by the Nazis, even though he wasn't ideologically Nazi. And that tells you something about what Kristallnacht was. It was a demarcation point before which German Jews felt that they still could have contact if they were elite, like my family was, like my German family was. They still could have contact with their German, non-Jewish friends. The German, you know, the focus on Kristallnacht is itself when we think about the meaning of Kristallnacht. It's a bit puzzling because far more German Jews survived than, say, Polish Jews. So, sometimes my wife and I will argue about, you know, why I focus so much. My mother was Polish Jewish, lived through the war in Poland and Russia, saw brutal things, but they were always impoverished, whereas my father's family were incredibly assimilated. They were German Germans, living in the middle of Berlin. My father used to watch Nazi parades and ask his nanny why he couldn't join them. They felt German. So what is it about that that seems so tragic? Seems so intense?
Professor Jason Stanley: And I think, you know, I think, for me, it's the fact of, you know, truly feeling assimilated. It's the sense that you could be ripped apart from your society now. German Jews were deeply assimilated, much more so than Polish Jews. And then they found it hard to believe what they were going to face. Unlike Polish Jews, they tended to have more assets and resources. But it's a time after which my father remembers nothing but fear. So I'm going to read just- I'm going to conclude by reading. This is my grandmother's memoir, The Unforgotten, published in 1957. So she was- my great grandfather was the cantor of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue, the head cantor for its entire existence. I was the largest congregation in Germany, in Berlin, and my grandmother was an actor. She was in the movie Metropolis and she also. So this is her description. She also was involved in underground work, saving people from Sachsenhausen. And all of that stopped after Kristallnacht. After Kristallnacht, you know, the sense- all of her book before Kristallnacht is about trying to convince her fellow German Jews how dangerous it is and that they have to leave. And after Kristallnacht, as Toby said, everybody knew they had to leave. That was the point of Kristallnacht. Now, I need to- before we focus on the German-Jewish population, you need to- Kristallnacht, the cause of it was Ernst vom Rath, was a German diplomat, was killed by a Polish, a young teenager, Polish Jewish teenager, right after the Germans had decided to expel all the stateless Jews in Germany, including his parents.
Professor Jason Stanley: And so then he killed the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. My great grandparents had dinner with Ernst vom Roth's parents the night before Kristallnacht. This is a very intensely personal connection. And, you know, in part I want to convey how recent this is. And they were horrified by what was happening. But all of the stateless Polish Jews who were sent to Poland by Germany, ended up dying. So, Kristallnacht is very much about the last population of Jews under Germany finally realizing what is happening and finally the rest of the German population. What I learned from my grandmother's book is that everybody had, you know, German Jews all had non-Jewish friends who were like, oh, these are the ones I take care of. Kristallnacht is the end of that, where you just. So that's the background. Ernst vom Rath is shot in Paris, and she's with the head of the Berlin Jewish community and the radio and listening to the radio. The body of the young Baron von Roth will be brought to Berlin for burial. As we reported before, Baron von Roth, who was shot in Paris by a Jew, succumbed to his injuries this evening. We can't indict the Jew in Paris. He is out of our reach. But the German people demand justice for this crime committed against one of their finest young men.
Professor Jason Stanley: The German people demand that the Jews in Germany pay for the murder of an innocent man. They demand full vengeance for this unbelievable crime, an impudent provocation of world Jewry against the German people. We accept the challenge and answer it with a just indignation that rises in every German heart against the Jewish murderers. I had heard enough. The German heart is rising up, I said disgustedly. The shrill ring of the telephone interrupted my sentence. For a second, Mr. Gross, the president of the German Berlin Jewish community, looked at me, frightened, as I never thought he would be. He hesitated. There was a second ring. He picked up the receiver. Yes, he said, and then cleared his throat. Who is it? What? I watched him, I wanted to ask, but at that moment the other phone started ringing. Before Mr. Gross could prevent me, I picked it up. For a moment, I did not grasp the message someone yelled and sobbed into the phone, but as confirmation of it, I saw outside the window a red glow light up the darkness. The voice on the phone cried out something like cupolas. My house was on fire. So I grew up with a picture of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue on our wall, the big synagogue in Berlin that Kaiser Wilhelm had given to the Jews of Germany, and we used to call it my house, even when I was growing up. I turned to Mr. Gross.
Professor Jason Stanley: He had picked up the first phone for a second time and stood listening with a completely helpless expression. My house. My house is burning. And there I tried to motion toward the window where the red glow became brighter. Not that. Not the temples. Not only that, one, said Mr. Gross, and I saw the tears coursing down his face. The Primcenstrassa 2. So then they go. They rush to the Fasanenstrasse temple. We turned into Fasanenstrasse, parked and ran toward the temple. It almost disappeared into the blinding smoke, but fire blazed from the cupolas and lit up the sky with a red glare. People surged around, restrained by SA men. I did not really comprehend everything, but the details seared themselves into my memory. Some women must have located the sacramental wine. They were pouring it on the flames while they sang the Horst-Wessel song. When the blood of the Jews shall spray from our knives, they screamed, leaping wildly. I've seen that before, I thought. Where have I seen that before? Of course, in films of the French Revolution, when they danced around the guillotine. Okay, so, I don't know. I don't know what- I thought about what the moral of Kristallnacht is my whole life. I don't think I can- I think it's too soon to be able to report anything. But I think for me, it's the closest experience to connecting, given how assimilated I grew up and the sense of disconnecting from a community that you just can't believe that you're no longer part of. All right. Now let's.
Movie: On the night of November the 9th, 1938, synagogues all over the Third Reich were set ablaze. The German population watched as people were brutally bullied and homes and businesses were ravaged. This was the day on which we realized that things were getting serious. It was the first sign that they had it in for the Jews. Jewish culture in Germany was virtually destroyed. Invaluable treasures were lost. The barbarism displayed by the National Socialists destroyed even the last dregs of faith in a civilized society in Germany. In the broad sense, I look back on it - many of us do - and we think that it was the opening shot of the Holocaust.
Tasman Rosenfeld: Hi, everyone. I'm Tasman Rosenfeld. I'm a senior in Berkeley College as well, a member of Shabtai. I think what was most shocking to me about this documentary was the clear complacency, you know, like, so much of this was state sanctioned, but the clear complacency of the general public. You know, these videos have kind of people just, like standing around and watching synagogues burn, is a extremely poignant reminder of our duty as citizens not to be casual bystanders to injustices that we see and reminds us that when we see injustice is taking place, it's absolutely our responsibility to step in and put an end to it. Right. Like no concessions, as you said. And, you know, this goes for violence against Jews, but violence against all people everywhere. So, yeah, let this be a lesson to us.
Isaac Menashe : Hello, everyone. My name is Isaac. I'm a freshman in Pauli Murray College. I come from Panama. One of the things, I have many points in mind, but one of them is like, what's Kristallnacht? So we saw the movie and everything. And when we saw, like, the Holocaust, it happened later. Like, we may think that this is- this is nothing compared to the Holocaust and the concentration camps. But in reality, like, I believe this is one of the most important events. Why? Because this was the turning point. This was the event. This was the event when like, you know, it's too late, right. And why I'm bringing this point because we see death and we see like, oh, 6 million Jews or this amount of Jews. We see like, numbers, only numbers. But what if we take those numbers and instead of like 4000, 6 million, we see one plus one plus one life after plus life plus life. We start seeing things differently and the magnitude of these events. So I do think, like we should not only see this event as something like it just happened, an event, it's nothing compared to the Holocaust, which is without significance with what's so important. This was what led to that. And yeah, I think we should think more about that. And to finish, I'm always- something that really impresses me and like shocks my mind is basically we see Germany, if you have taken a philosophy class or anything, the most important thinkers in history came from Germany, right?
Isaac Menashe : These Germans in 1940s were one of the most capable people in the world: doctors, engineers. It's just like so amazing, but in the negative way to see how these people who were so capable, instead of using their abilities, they use them to destroy people, to destroy our nation, to destroy. I mean, it's crazy to think it that way. And we right here we are in Yale University, one of the most important universities in the world. We are like studying. We are training ourselves to become people, like, just like they were. The most important people in the intellectual realm, the most important thinkers, important doctors. And I think it's something we should consider and be responsible, take a duty that instead of doing what they did, use our abilities to do something good to the world. Because imagine if the Nazis, instead of doing that, if they would have build bridges among people, they would have solved the world's most important problems. Where would we have been now? So something to think about that. Very sad.
Professor Jason Stanley: So Du Bois, in his 1946 book The World of Africa, starts out by saying the model of civilization was Germany, the great, universities the great. And then he says, look at what civilization is.
Aaron Schorr: My name is Aaron Schorr. I'm a Yale College sophomore from Jerusalem, Israel. And I want to kind of build upon both Isaac's and Tasman's points and think about duty to to resist injustice. We saw these scenes in the film, right? You see this, like, drunk, angry mob burning the synagogues. And, you know, the fire department is helping them, making sure that they really burn down. The police are there to make sure that no one interferes with what they're doing. That is clearly not the moment to speak up against injustice. Or obviously it is a moment, but it's not the moment. When all political opposition has been, you know, thrown into concentration camps and the entire state is directed at these specific efforts to get rid of Jews in Germany, that's not when you can push back against it. The moment to push back against it is well before that. Right. This is five and a half years into the Nazi rule. The moment to stop it was well before Kristallnacht. And I think everyone should sort of take a moment to think about when that moment could have been and how people could have spotted it, and what ordinary people could have done in order to stop it, because clearly they all failed to do it, right. The people like sitting there watching, it's not like they can get up and like do anything about it. They'll get thrown into the next cell at Dachau with, you know, the Jewish men that are being rounded up. So I think the lesson from Kristallnacht is to think about the process they got there and not the actual moment that compels people to act.
Kyle Begis: Hey, everyone. My name is Kyle. I'm a senior in Davenport. Yeah. This is a- it's a really heavy night, and there's a lot of serious and devastating emotion that goes into it. Kristallnacht for me, it's a strange day. And for my family, my grandmother wrote a book a few years ago about my family's history in, I forget the name- the name of the town starts with an R. But the book is called Good Neighbors, Bad Times, and we talk a lot about the moment isn't to act on the night of Kristallnacht, but in my grandma's neighborhood, it was the people who did act that saved our family's lives. It was a town that was very civil between Jews and Christians, and they helped take all the torahs out of the synagogues before they burned down. And they helped get all the Jews to safety. And watching this documentary, the moment that stuck with me the most is the guy who is surprised that the memory that stuck with him the most is the car burning, not the synagogue burning, it's the car burning because it is so much harder to hate people than it is to hate ideas.
Kyle Begis: And we like- it's hard when you actually think about the people and you think about the ones, the 6 million individuals, it's so much heavier. You can't even grasp 6 million individuals because you can barely grasp one. But I think thinking, just remembering, how human their evil was, but how compassionate some humans could be is really important and how- because we can't speak for ideologies here or anywhere, but we can speak for what we do and who we are. And I, like, I thank those Germans daily for my life who saved my family because if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be here and we all wouldn't be. And well, not we all, but my family wouldn't be here. And remembering that it's not about ideologies. And at the end of the day, it can't be about theory or thought or what you stand for or who you believe in. It has to be about who you are and what you as a you will do, not you as a collective. Because yeah, we can say we have to stop, fight justice and we have to do blank, but unless you are actively doing it and you are going against the grain to save some people who you might not even agree with, but they're people and you can recognize that.
Kyle Begis: And I think keeping that in the back of your mind when you watch all of this horrible footage of people very easily destroying buildings and furniture and goods. But when you put it in terms of a person going to another person's home, your neighbor's home, and destroying them because of things that they believe, and just negating all the rest of the humanness that goes on in their lives, that's the horror. And in a world that's more digital and removed than ever, maintaining that humanism is the only thing I want to leave you with on a somewhat of a positive, because it's a tough night. But we need positives because otherwise it's just too tough. And remembering to just be human and regardless of beliefs or needs, I think to me is a positive. I want to make sure you remember in this really night of serious tragedy for Jews. Thanks.
Quinn Moss : Hi everybody. I'm Quinn, I'm a second year in Jonathan Edwards and I would echo what everybody has said tonight. Thank you all for your incredible words tonight. I was thinking a lot about what Professor Stanley and Toby were talking about at the beginning of the night with regards to the idea of assimilation and the fact that assimilation will not save you. This idea of assimilation is obviously something that I think has been pushed on a lot of subjugated groups throughout history, ourselves included. And so I think that this night, being evidence of that not working, assimilation not saving you or being capable of saving you, is yet another reason to be grateful for and actively protect and celebrate your people and your religion and your community. And so, on that note, on perhaps another positive note, I'm very grateful, especially after watching this documentary, to have the opportunity to watch it and partake in it with all of you and partake in that remembrance with all of you. So thank you to everybody.
Richard Hausman: Hi. My name is Richard. I'm a sophomore at Yale College and there are just a couple of things I want to speak on. First of all, this story, I should have known it in more depth than I did. It's a story of how my family ended up half in Israel and half in the United States. And I, of course, knew the basic details, but the fact that I didn't know it further is sort of shameful to me, so I'm committed to learning even more. And a couple other things, further on the note of assimilation, as the professor noted, you know, your family was well integrated into German society. And from a superficial level, Jews could be considered to not be so different from the non-Jewish population in Germany. And yet look at how that ended up. So imagine how much easier it is to otherize people who look different or have even more different religions than we do. And it's important to be really conscious of that, and also of the fact that fascism always needs an enemy to sort of justify its existence. So, if it's not you, it's just not you yet. So at any point when you see the thinking, I think the poem goes, first they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the communists and so on and so on. And then when it was my turn, there was no one to speak for me. So, you know, whenever you see this type of thinking, including in your own mind, it's important to confront it immediately. Yeah.
Jun-Davinci Choi : I'm not a Jew, but I speak as a citizen of the world and in particular from my background as an artist. Many years ago, I was playing a new piece of work that was titled March to Oblivion, and the composer had hidden the Horst-Wessel-Lied into this piece. But when he was telling us about the origins and the motivations for this piece, he told us nothing about the actual intent of the music and told us it can be about anything and try to make light of it. But why? Why was he ashamed to hide the actual roots of the music that we were playing? Yes, we were kids. I was only 15 at the time, but 15 is not too young an age to learn about the horrors that happen in the world. But one thing that I learned from this lesson, one thing that I learned as an artist, is the importance of culture. When you want to destroy an identity, the easiest way to do so is by destroying culture. We saw this in the documentary. They destroyed architecture. They destroyed people. They separated families. You destroy the units that make a culture what it is. You read off figureheads, you imprison them, you take the language, you take their books. You take the culture that makes them unique. But here's another thing. One thing that has been echoed by, I think, everyone who has come at this mic today. When people remove culture, we cannot be apathetic to that. This is why us as citizens of the world, it's not just about learning history. It's not just about learning what happens here. It's about being appreciative of cultures that we might not understand, that we might never understand, but to understand that they exist and these differences exist, but we can coexist even then. So I ask you today, don't just be citizens of the world. Be appreciative of the cultures around you and be artists of the world. Thank you.
Grace Vojta : So something that was touched on earlier in the documentary was this concept of leaving. And my family was Ashkenazi Jewish from Czechoslovakia, and we left very early on in World War II. And because of that, we lost our Jewish history and all of our memory, our language, everything. And now I just think of myself as an American and to do the work of learning my family's history, I have to watch documentaries like this. And so when we think about why people were so resistant to leave in the first place, I just think it's key to remember all of the aspects of what you have to leave when you're forced by such hatred and evil.
Brady Rowe: Hi, my name is Brady. I'm a public health student here in the grad program. I think the big takeaway from this documentary for me was one of resistance and resistance really at all costs. You can't tell by my diminutive stature, but I am quite a bit Dutch. My grandfather is Dutch. My great grandfather was Dutch. I'm the shortest person in my family by quite a bit. It's a real drag. But one of my proudest family possessions is a diary that my great grandfather kept. My grandfather was born in 1941, right as the war was wrapping up. So when he immigrated to Canada, one of the very few possessions that he was able to take with him was his father's diary. And a third of the diary or so, once translated, was revealed to talk about how he was, my great grandfather, was a flower merchant, had large greenhouses in Aalsmeer, just outside of Amsterdam, and at the start of the war he converted everything to a greenhouse for vegetable growing because nobody wanted to buy tulips in the middle of a war. And because he was an able bodied man, they tried to conscript him into the war so the Nazis would send the men around to gather the young men and to take them away to war. And he wanted to avoid this. So he has some journal entries that he wrote that are smudged with coal because he had his wife bury him under their coal pile.
Brady Rowe: He built a little box for himself, and it was really more of a coffin. I later saw pictures of it. It's just sort of a horrendous thing to think of trying to stuff yourself in there. But instead of fleeing the country, he felt like it was his duty to resist and to fight. And he sort of and this is sort of apocryphal, who knows if this is true, but he had a list of some of the families in hiding that he was delivering food to, and he was delivering to a Frank family in Amsterdam. And who knows if it's the famous one or not. But I think about the sacrifices that everybody who who didn't stay for themselves, who stayed for others, who suffered for themselves, he ended up being captured and killed. He wasn't Jewish, but he was an ally. And so they took his life. And my grandfather never got to meet his dad, and I think about what it means to not stand by, like Tas was talking about, to witness the synagogue on fire, to witness the cupola coming down, and to decide that it's worth the burns to perhaps not repeat those same mistakes. It's a hard thing to do in the moment, but something that maybe we could all keep a journal about and try and maintain this idea that it is our responsibility.
Michael Klein: Hi everyone, I'm Michael, I am a first year MBA at the School of Management. So I've seen a lot of Holocaust and World War II documentaries, so I guess my mind was really focused on the ending here and just how unsatisfying I felt that we see the progression of how everything unfolds, the climax, we understand what happened during the Holocaust, and then the end is that a bunch of people spent a lot of money to rebuild the synagogue for really nobody to come back and use to basically serve as sort of a, you know, a monument to what used to be. Willing to fly the man back to go and see it, which he declined as he also felt a, you know, a lack of a connection with it. And I think for me, sort of if your takeaway after watching the whole documentary is to rebuild the synagogue, brick for brick, for nobody to show up and use it like it sort of speaks to the fact that if we don't figure out what the right takeaway is, or what a good takeaway is and a good next step really is coming out of it, that we are going to make a lot of the same mistakes. And that's really scary. And so it's certainly been very heartening to hear so many great observations and takeaways of things that we need to collectively understand that if we're going to go back and go through the exercise to look at what happened, to be able to figure out how we can identify things in the current society that could lead that way and to prevent them and that we don't make the same mistakes. But I think at least the ending to me really is a warning that that's not the ending we want to be from this.
Jackson Downey : My name is Jackson, also a first year in Yale College. I guess the thing that I've been thinking about most is just more of like how I fit into this, you know, as being like a Jew a lot later and I just, I feel like a bit guilty seeing like, how many people lost their lives for practicing a religion that I have a really casual relationship with. And at the same time, I think about just how lucky I am to be in a time where I can freely practice like such an amazing religion in a place that's like, so beautiful without the fear of like- without any fear at that matter, and like just how important it is for all of us to just like, aside from the politics or whatever, like just to be appreciative of the fact that we have this and we can do this together. And, I don't know, I just felt like, you know, we're- People did a lot for me to practice Judaism. I should be practicing more. You know-
Professor Jason Stanley: Let me be clear. You would have been a target whether you practiced or not. It had nothing to do with practice. It had to do with the Nazi anti-Semitism. The Jews were the communist elite. You know, the atheists that's- I mean, the Nazi anti-Semitism was directed against the most assimilated, the leftist elite. You know, this model, it didn't help, as you know.
Jackson Downey : Right. Of course.
Professor Jason Stanley: There were German, I mean, I'm German Jewish. I mean, and on my father's side and a tradition of German Judaism is to be, you know, part of the country liberal university, you know, involved in, you know, part of the great German culture and civilization. That side of my family is very much like that. And so it was targeting that too. It was targeting, you know, leftist communists, homosexuals who supposedly were, you know, Hitler blamed feminism on Jews. But yeah.
Jackson Downey : And aren't we lucky to be at a time where that's not what's happening to us? Right.
Jaime Levin: Professor Stanley, you actually came to my norms. I'm Jamie, I'm a sophomore at Yale College. Professor Stanley actually came to my norms and deviance course in the spring of last semester, so I was just reflecting on some of the ideas that you brought to that course. Particularly, something in your book, about how important it is to look at the label makers themselves. Like one thing I was reflecting on is just how important it is to make sure that the people in power who, you know, we both select and don't select, we need to recognize that they have a huge, you know, power to make labels and shape perceptions. And so I just was reflecting on how important it is to make sure that the groups that we think as deviant in society, are they actually deviant or are they being, you know, socially constructed by our leaders? So that was something I was reflecting on. Just to take away with is how important it is that people in power who, you know, we see our, you know, label makers. And I think that was like a huge point that I took away from, from your book. And I really appreciated that in the spring. So thank you.
Professor Jason Stanley: Yeah, I mean, Germany was the least anti-Semitic country in Europe in 1932, it was France that you would expect the Holocaust, if anything. So it's a story, insofar as we think about this, as about being about German Jews since the Germans had already brutalized the Austrian Jews, the Polish population. I mean, it's about, you know, this concept of assimilation and this concept of, you know, turning against. My grandmother, they wanted to do a movie about her in the 1950s, and she refused because the movie made Germans look bad. Huh? That was which, you know, my Polish Jewish mother does not have that view about Poland.
Anna Gumberg: Hi everyone. My name is Anna. I just wanted to- it's very interesting to hear all of the people talking about kind of what the flashpoint was, or as far as the point that should have been identified when a bystander could have actually had an effect. And this is something that I've thought about quite a bit in my studies of World War II in general. I remember taking a class my first year at Yale that talked about Nazi aesthetics and kind of the use of aesthetics to turn a very normal population against people, and particularly what just came up as far as whether you were a practicing Jew or not, you would still be a target. It gets to the point of just how nonsensical it is because Judaism is a religion, right? There are ethnic lines, but something I've always wondered is, would the Nazis even consider someone who converted at the last second? Would they be taken to a concentration camp because they wouldn't fit the constraints that there's this ethnicity that was, you know, subverting everything that Germany stood for. But that's kind of beside the point. What I am curious about, and I'm wondering if anyone has an answer to, a lot of historians in the room, is there an agreed upon turning point? Because something that I think is interesting, you know, even being in college today, I'm a philosophy major, and pretty much every class that deals with anything evil like World War II and Nazism is such an easy example.
Anna Gumberg: Kind of like anytime someone needs an example of evil, they say, oh, Hitler. And it's so easy now to look back on, like, I've checked out Mein Kampf from the library a couple of times, and I've only made it through like a couple passages and they're insane. And it's just so easy for us now to kind of see the thread, but I'm wondering if there's an agreed upon point where things did change, because when we're talking about now, we need to look out for these kind of warning signs. I really don't know when it's clear. And sometimes in the modern day I hear things kind of likened to World War II, and it can be borderline offensive because it seems like it's a totally different thing. But, I don't know, maybe I'm missing these kinds of warning signs that are really important. So this, I don't know, all of your reflections as well as the film have kind of made me want to look into this more and see if there was a more reasonable point where it was clear that things were heading in this direction or not, but overall enriching experience. And I would also like to thank everyone for their words tonight.
Tasman Rosenfeld: I'm not a historian. And I shamefully don't know enough about the history of Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Germany in the early 1900s. But my initial like, gut response to your question was like, oh, what's the turning point? Or, you know, my initial response is, as soon as you recognize, as soon as you realize that there's some injustice happening, like some group is being singled out, or, you see, like any kind of violent rhetoric being directed towards a group like that's when it's our responsibility to step in and take action. Right. Like, I don't you know, I don't think that it's practical or reasonable to make arguments about like, well, you know, at this point, you know, once things start getting this bad is when, you know, duty to step in and you know, when it's your duty to step in. It's like as soon as you realize that something evil is taking place, right? Like that's when you as an individual step up. So, you know, when that was, I mean, like anti-Semitism had been taking place for decades longer all across Europe, right? So the seeds have been sown for quite a long time.
Carolyne Newman: Hi, I'm Caroline, I'm a senior in Davenport. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. And for those of you who have spoken, I'm just really amazed. I don't- I usually have a lot to say. Tonight, I just can't get past the nausea. I don't really have much of an intellectual take or any sage advice, but the words you've all said is amazing. I guess something that I definitely am happy Shmully gave me the opportunity to say this is, I hope we take this movie and the lessons of this memorial as a reminder to protect our spaces. I look at the doorposts of this building, and I think of the doorposts of my grandma's house, and I think of how the Jews marked the doorposts with blood so that they could protect their firstborn sons and during Passover. And there there are very few places on the planet where anyone can be accepted, depending on where you are, and I just feel very thankful that I live in a place where I feel safe. But it's important to protect those places. Thank you.
Aya Hall : Hi, I'm Aya, I'm a senior in Pauli Murray. And I think one thing that I was thinking about in particular throughout the entire movie is how this very important narrative that is, you know, about one of the most fundamental things that we should care about, human life gets lost primarily in like, I think the sphere of education. I mean, here at Yale, we should be very thankful to have, like, this amazing faculty. But my personal experience, like, with middle school or high school history classes, is that this narrative gets really lost under, like, the themes of glory around, oh, we won World War II. Our country is so great, we beat the Germans. But you know what happens after. So when I was still in Russia in middle school, it was the same exact narrative. Oh, you know, the Soviet Union was so great. So many people went to die for the cause of defeating Germans. But it's never, you know, this narrative is never portrayed at its core. You know, this vile act is never mentioned. It's all like, kind of under this veil of there was an evil.
Aya Hall : Nobody's quite sure of what it is, but this doesn't matter, because the most important thing is that our country is great, that we went and we won against them. And the same exact narrative I received when I went to high school here in Indiana, just from a different standpoint, from an American standpoint, I don't know. I'm sure that there are much better high schools than mine or middle schools that have taught the extensive history of everything. But I also know that I definitely did not go to the worst schools out there. And even if 50% of high schools are not teaching this, I think that, you know, even in this generation, it's very easy to get these themes either misconstrued or just lost completely under that narrative. So movies like that really help bring that all to light. And I think that's important, especially, you know, about all the things that we talked about, about not repeating the same things again. So I'm glad that these kind of movies exist.
Israel Yolou: Hi. My name is Israel Yolou. I'm in Davenport. I'm a senior. I think one of my takeaways from this is it's like the strength and resilience of the Jewish people. As was mentioned several times earlier, they'd been persecuted for centuries leading up to this all over Western Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. And one of the fascinating things is just, throughout this time, they were able to hold on to their beliefs, hold on to traditions, and fight through it. Yeah, it's kind of hard to, like, watch this kind of stuff. But yeah, even today, we still see, like, anti-Semitism. But like, yeah, the resilience is something that's always fascinated me. Yeah. And when you see, like, several threads coming out of the Holocaust where some like, I guess, lost faith, others kept faith. You see this in the form of, like, Elie Wiesel, I think his name or Reese-.
Toby Hecht: Elie Wiesel.
Israel Yolou: And then you have like Viktor Frankl, on the other hand, where you have these individuals really wrestling with what it means to be Jewish and like their relationship with God. You said earlier this wasn't necessarily a matter of their faith. Just being Jewish got you killed. But I think it's a very important matter that they're able to, like, go back to these events and really wrestle with it, because it keeps it in the minds of people and it prevents this kind of stuff from happening again. I think one of the things that we saw is, like with the German society there five and a half years in, leading into 1938, decided that had been so socially engineered to accepting this hatred that Kristallnacht was like- It was a crazy idea for them. But in the case of the Jews on us today, we can do to prevent that sort of social engineering is look back at history and really, like, wrestle with what happened and ask questions. Again, like Frankl and Elie, I think that's how we prevent this kind of stuff from happening again. And that's how we maintain a sense of identity and strong culture.
Professor Jason Stanley: Can I take a question?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. If you want you want to talk generally, you know.
Professor Jason Stanley: I'll just quickly say because it's a theme that returns this distinction versus assimilationist idea that we face, we American Jews and all of us face in America. You know how much to retain in your group or how much to assimilate. And the Nazis Nazi ideology targeted the Jews because they said the Jews had this idea that we're leading to this idea that you could, that lots of different people could live together in the same society. So the very assimilationist idea that you could have Jews in a society with non-Jews, that's the idea that the Jews were behind that is Nazi ideology. So the role of assimilation is part of what we have to think about and part of what we have to defend because that's what was under attack, not just this identity.
Serena Lin : That's actually really similar to what I was thinking about- my voice, sorry. I was thinking about the professor's story, about how his family had very successfully assimilated into German culture. And assimilation is something I've been thinking about. I immigrated to the United States when I was really young. My grandmother was an illiterate rice farmer, and I was thinking about how much of a success story of assimilation that my own life has been. The arc. Sorry. I'm Serena, I'm a junior at Yale. And I think that there's so much that's lost or purposefully shed in high achieving minorities, especially immigrants. You change your name to be easier to pronounce. You send your children to English schools. My parents never spoke English around me. They only spoke English around me growing up because they were afraid that I would speak English with an accent and that would make me less employable or less appealing to higher education and high schools and other things like that. And I think that one of the lessons that I've sort of taken from this is that someone earlier said, like, assimilation can't save you. And I think that that's true. And I think that like, at a certain point, there's no erasing that fundamental difference that other people or like, structures of power will see in you. And there's like something wonderful that's lost and like running away from your heritage. And that's something like I've sort of, like arrived at recently having sort of run as hard and fast as I could away from the place I came from. But yeah, I'm like really grateful today to be here with all of you and to give things another shot. Yeah. Thanks so much.
Leah Traube: Hi. I'm Leah, and I'm shy. I've been trying to think about what everybody else is saying and see what I want to say. First of all, thank you very much for sharing. And thank you for having me. So my father's parents were both Holocaust survivors. My father's father was from Poland, all of his family was killed in 1942, and my grandmother was a Hungarian Jew and she had a few members of her family survive. And I was telling Toby about this a couple of weeks ago. But every year at the Passover Seder, my grandmother would come and she would - it was the worst time - she would come and she would cry, and I hated it. I wish she wouldn't come because her father, like, I just imagine this, like we're sitting in our house and my parents have a house in the suburbs. Right. And then all of a sudden there was a knock on the door and they literally came and took her father. And like, I just imagined that the police that we rely on here would just come and turn against us and take our family members. And that's what happened. So when I'm watching this, I'm thinking, okay, we live in this beautiful, wonderful country that my father always says in Hebrew, he says, "medinad chesed" that it's like a charitable State, and that we're so lucky that we live here and that when his father survived and he came here, he encouraged all of his children to achieve higher education and to go to school.
Leah Traube: And my grandfather, actually after Auschwitz, after he was there for five years, went to Columbia to get a PhD because he said, where else does a Jew in this world, have this opportunity? And so I don't have a specific family connection to this, but to what we saw here. But I see it as a Jewish national connection and what's very important is that I see that when people on the outside are saying we're all Jews and we're all the same, then we, at least as Jews from the inside, need to find places of Jewish unity, like we have here in this room a variety of backgrounds, of education, of observance. Some people are not observant. Some people are very observant. And when the outsiders see us as all the same, at the very least we can have infighting. We all have to have more unity. So, that's the first point. And then the second point is that, like when we see things that are happening to other groups, that we need to stand up for those people and make sure that those things don't happen to them, because we know what it's like to be victims of just persecution for no reason whatsoever. Okay. Thank you.
Cameron Janssens: Hi everyone. My name is Cameron. I am a sophomore in the college from New York, and so I think a lot of what I was taking away from this has already been touched on, but something I was just thinking about is sort of an experience I had, I think, a week and a half ago. So I, you know, grew up in New York. Being Jewish was sort of just like second nature. It was just something, surrounded by it everywhere. So it honestly, you know, up until sort of when I started going to Yale, didn't feel very special. It just felt like, yeah, part of my identity. So it was part of everyone else's, you know? Cool. But then I got to Yale, and that was the first time I sort of encountered people who had never met Jews before. This was like a crazy phenomenon. Like how? What do you mean you didn't go to high school with any Jewish, you know, classmates? Like, how is that even possible? But then obviously, when you think about it, it makes sense. And so last week, I was talking to one of my friends and I said, yeah, no, do you have any fun Thanksgiving plans?
Cameron Janssens: She said, oh yeah, I'm going home to see my family. How about you? Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? I was like, what? Obviously, I celebrate Thanksgiving. In fact, you know, we celebrate Thanksgiving and read The New Colossus every single Thanksgiving. And I think sort of that combined with this made me realize, you know, a lot of people have touched on how lucky, you know, Jews are to live in a country where not only are they free to just celebrate, but also, you know, be proud of their their identity. But, also, sort of made me realize how important it is to, like, educate other people about your identity and not just to take it as, you know, something that you are and something that you do in your free time, but more that, you know, being willing and proud to show it to other people and show that, you know, there are different ways that people live. And, you know, these are some of the universal aspects of it, that we can all come together and bring it as a unifying force so.
Ekaterina Koposova : Hi everyone. I'm Ekaterina. Well, I mean, I am glad to be invited. It's a strange word to use on a night like this. I think one of the themes that resonated with me from the wonderful comments we've heard is the idea of the complacency of the observers that we see in the documentary. And I think it's even more than complacency. I think it's this, and someone will correct me if I say this wrong, schadenfreude. This idea that you take pleasure in the suffering of somebody else. And I think that it's something we should probably think of more. In our own day, is this idea that sometimes people we don't like, we don't agree with, something happens and we take, you know, we think, well, you know, this person has different political views or different opinions and, well, maybe they had it coming, you know. And I think that what moments like this shows that it's a dangerous emotion, schadenfreude. It's a dangerous thing to feel. And we should catch ourselves if we ever feel it and reflect on the bystanders. And then another thing I wanted to say, and that's something that sort of I feel guilty saying it because it takes away a little bit from the main theme of the evening, but I feel compelled to say it. I'm from Russia and the idea of the glorious narrative of this victory in the Second World War in Russia, I think, is a little different than it is in the US, because in Russia, this is a narrative that allowed people, the oppressive regime, to subsume in that glory the repressions that were happening in the country at the time. Things like the Holodomor, which was something that happened in the Ukraine. So I guess I just wanted to make this minor point because I felt compelled to and I didn't want to bring it up because I think it may make us feel uncomfortable. And then I reflected on the lessons of tonight and thought, well, perhaps sometimes we should address uncomfortable things. So thank you.
Alexander Josowitz : Hi everyone. I'm Alex, I'm actually a sixth year PhD student in biomedical engineering, so I've been here for quite a while. So my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor from Romania, though at the time they didn't really have a national identity. They were living in a, like a border town, the border of Hungary, and they were kind of not really under any jurisdiction. And that flip flopped a lot between Hungary and Romania, and it didn't really matter in the end. So like his brother was conscripted into the Russian army and eventually, like, went to a labor camp in Russia while he ended up in a concentration camp in Germany and there's like this crazy story of how they eventually reunited after his brother came, emigrated to Israel, and he immigrated to the US. And so the place where he settled was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I grew up in Pittsburgh, and about three years ago, almost very close, like about a couple of weeks ago to this date, there was, like about two blocks from where I grew up. Like a shooter entered a synagogue on Shabbat and killed people from my community, based on ideas that were very similar to the ideas that the Nazis held.
Alexander Josowitz : And it scared me profoundly because I grew up in Jewish, went to a Jewish school growing up like blocks away from this synagogue. I'd been to this synagogue many times, friends, bar and bat mitzvahs there. And like just seeing just something that kept replaying in my mind today as we were watching this. Like when people were talking about the point at which we say, oh, this is the point where we have to stand up there isn't really like it's when you hear someone like on the news, calling out groups of people, that's already too far. So yeah, that's- I think it's important for us to be able to have these conversations, but try to have these conversations with as many people as we can so that they can engage with the ideas of the realities behind what people actually experienced in the death and that process of desensitization that leads to the death. Thanks.
Zacharie Sciamma: Hi, everyone. I'm Zacharie. I'm a senior in Davenport.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: It's actually for the mouthpiece.
Zacharie Sciamma: The mic? I guess first, I just want to say how moving it is to see so many people here who have all sorts of backgrounds. It's kind of crazy to be able to trace your history back, you know, two generations, three generations, and think how people were, like all of the all over the world and now we're kind of just like all here in this room. When I was a kid- So I grew up in Paris until I was four, and we actually left because of anti-Semitism and moved to England. And I guess it's not often that I really appreciate what that means. And a bit later, maybe when I was maybe, like ten or so, maybe a bit older, a bit younger, my mom took me to see a film in Paris. It was had just come out in cinemas. It was called El Sapo, El sapo, which means Her name was Sara, and it was basically a film about a young, just married couple who move into a home in Paris, and little by little discover about the the history of the owners, the previous owners of that home, who were also a Jewish couple and who were deported. And you kind of see them just go down this like, like this history and just be kind of terrified about what happened in this home.
Zacharie Sciamma: And I was really young and this movie really, really scared me. I couldn't sleep, like, for several nights or something. And I remember afterwards I, you know, I asked my mom, like, why did you take me to see this? You know, like, that was really terrifying. And I guess now I'm very grateful that it's something that I was, you know, educated about very early on. And I guess, professor, seeing your kids here today, I kind of thought the same thing. You know, it's hard to know, to understand when you're a kid. I think it's really, really important. I guess about the film itself, one thing that particularly struck me was how you could see just buildings getting torn down and rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt and if you I mean, I'm European, so if you ever go around any, like, European cities, there will be like Holocaust memorials and like little signs and things pretty much everywhere. I forget where it is, maybe someone can correct me, but I think it's like an Amsterdam where you have like stumbling stones, which are these-.
Professor Jason Stanley: Stolpersteine. They're all over Germany.
Zacharie Sciamma: And it's like these.
Professor Jason Stanley: And Austria and Holland.
Zacharie Sciamma: Oh, wow. So they actually.
Professor Jason Stanley: Yeah. Started in Germany. But all of this is your generation. When I lived in Germany in the 80s, there was nothing, quite recent.
Zacharie Sciamma: Yeah, they look very new.
Professor Jason Stanley: 20 to 25 years.
Zacharie Sciamma: And, basically, there are these sort of golden or like bricks in the sidewalk that kind of stand out and tell you about a family who was victims of the Holocaust, who lived in the building nearby or something like that. In some places, they're really everywhere. And it's hard to appreciate, I guess, when you're walking down these roads, like, all these little blocks all around what they actually mean. But I think it'll definitely, for me, be very different to just be wherever in Paris or any European cities I go to in the future, to just kind of be looking around the buildings and things and just- kind of like in this movie, you know, the aesthetic of European cities is pretty much the same as here. So I think it'll definitely be very different to be looking around and seeing these very familiar looking buildings and thinking, you know, like you can only just imagine what kind of history might have gone on in there and I guess what's kind of been hidden away.
Cade Napier: My name is Cade Napier. I'm a junior in Pierson College. I guess this made me think about, a little bit about, Hannah Arendt's theory about the banality of evil. I guess I see these images of the firefighters not fighting the fire. I mean, regular people who decide not to do anything, right. I mean, she was inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, right? Who ran trains. But that's, you know, obviously quite substantial for this whole experience, for the whole Holocaust and everything. But, I mean, it's just about, as a lot of other people have said earlier tonight, like this evil exists around us, and it's just important to point out and everything. Thank you.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm going to close. So my name is Shmully Hecht. I'm one of the founders here of Shabtai. I would like to just personally thank Professor Jason Stanley for coming. Frankly, on very late notice, as we all know. This entire event was planned on late notice. It was actually inspired because on Friday night here, Shabbat dinner, a sophomore mentioned to me in passing, parenthetically, how ignorant our generation is of the Holocaust, and we should be doing something about it. And I went home and it was Shabbos. I don't turn my computer on on Shabbos, but as soon as Shabbos was over, I got on the computer and said, okay, this week is Kristallnacht. We need to do something about it. And, fairly rapidly, we sent out what we call a Shmully Hecht blitz email, which is if you've been within three blocks of this mansion, you're getting an email from me as I joked. And the members of Shabtai decided to host this tonight. So I want to thank you, Professor Jason Stanley, for being here tonight, for sharing personal thoughts. I want to thank the members of Shabtai for, of course, always making sure that the events here are done well. I'd like to, of course, thank Toby for speaking passionately and so on point about the evening. I also want to thank each and every one of you for being here tonight. And I just personally think it's important that we did this. A few very, very brief comments.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The Jews of Germany thought they were more German than the Germans. The Germans reminded the Jews that they were Jews. Jews are different. They cannot assimilate. And the world reminds us of that over and over and over again. On that note, we're all different. And our differences should make us stronger and prouder. The Jew is perhaps the icon of difference in the world. It has been historically for thousands of years. Read history. So at a time that we talk about unity and diversity, it's a moment for women, for blacks, for Jews, for gays, for communists, for atheists, for intellectuals, for artists, for the blind, for astronauts and scientists and doctors and handicapped and greats to stand up for our differences. I watched the second plane hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 in the Owl Shop with Ben Karp, who's the founder, the real founder of Shabtai, the architect of this institution. I said, Ben, what do you think? He said after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor shortly thereafter, the Emperor of Japan said, I'm afraid we've awoken a sleeping giant. It ended in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bomb that killed 200,000 innocent people to end the war that was killing tens of millions. A few weeks after 9/11, Ben and I were having a conversation, and we discovered the extraordinary fact that 19 people who were committed to a cause will change the world forever. Twenty years later, we're still taking our shoes off every time we go to the airport.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: 19 people, billions of times we've taken our shoes off. Billions. 19 people. So I'm going to end tonight on a high note. A really high note. I'm going to send out an email tonight to everybody that's in this room. I have absolute confidence and belief that the 25 or 30 people sitting in this room can and will change the world for the good. The Final Solution, the extermination of world Jewry, was planned by a small group of Germans. And 6 million Jews died. Small group of Germans got together and planned the Final Solution. 9/11, 19 people, 19 courageous people who actually believed in something. Terrible, evil people. The 25 or 30 of us that are sitting in this room, I'm going to send you an email tonight, and we're going to make a vow, collective vow in our hearts and in our souls and in our minds that we are going to change the world for good. Each of us in our own way. I've been on this campus for 25 years. A lot of things happened in 25 years. It's 20 years since 9/11. That's our generation. 75-80 years since the Holocaust. In twenty years from now, I'm going to recirculate the email. And the challenge tonight to each and every one of us after a Kristallnacht gathering, I believe the only in-person Kristallnacht gathering in Connecticut. The challenge for us is to change the world for the good.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Billions and billions of times. Imagine if we make the vow, the commitment tonight in a little house on the edge of Yale's campus to change the world for good. Then, in twenty years from now, we will not believe what we've accomplished. For ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for those that are like us and for those that are not like us. And it starts with one little cute little thing that I do for which my children always harass me. They always say, Ta what are you doing? When I see a car on the side of the highway with their hazards on, I always call 911. I know that I've saved lives doing it. I don't know who they are. I'll never know. Don't wait for somebody else to call 911. To echo one of the great themes of tonight's talk, the underlying theme, perhaps, that we all talked about was that it's not the big, big, big thing. It's the small thing. It's the one and the one and the one and the one. So we're going to make a commitment in our hearts and in our souls and in our minds tonight to change the world in our way. And that's why we got together tonight. And we should celebrate the night that we launched our response to Kristallnacht to better the world for all of mankind in our way, individually, hence collectively, hence globally and hence eternally. Thank you for being here.