Remembering the Night of Broken Glass
THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2018-2019 61
By Elizabeth Gelman, Executive Director
of The Florida Holocaust Museum
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave
of pogroms, state-sponsored terrorism, against
the Jews in Germany and Austria. Within a few
short hours, thousands
of synagogues, Jewish
businesses and homes
were damaged or
destroyed. This event
has become known as
Kristallnacht, or Night of
Broken Glass, and refers to
the broken shop windows
of Jewish-owned stores
that carpeted the streets.
The pretext for this violence was the Nov. 7
assassination in Paris of German diplomat Ernst
Vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish
teenager whose parents, along with 17,000 other
Polish Jews, had been expelled from the Reich.
The next day, an inflammatory editorial appeared
in the official Nazi press and sporadic anti-Jewish
rioting began.
Though portrayed as spontaneous outbursts of
popular outrage, these pogroms were calculated
acts of retaliation carried out by the SA, the
SS and local Nazi party organizations. That
night, instructions were conveyed to all parts
of the country to encourage participation in the
atmosphere of outrage. A mass frenzy broke out:
synagogues were destroyed and burned, shop
windows of Jewish-owned stores were shattered,
and the demolished stores were looted. Jewish
homes were assaulted, and in many places, Jews
were physically attacked. Some 267 synagogues
were destroyed, more than 7,000 shops were
destroyed, and 30,000 Jews were arrested, often
with the help of previously prepared lists. This
was the first time that riots against the Jews of
Germany had been organized on such an extensive
scale accompanied by mass detention.
A powerful partnership reflected in music
The Florida Holocaust Museum has more than
17,000 objects and artifacts, as well as hundreds
of recorded testimonies from survivors of the
Holocaust. In our museum and throughout
our educational outreach,
we discuss the origins of
antisemitism and the rise of
Adolph Hitler, the systematic
state-sponsored persecution
of Jews and others deemed
“sub-human,” and the
resulting torture and murder
of between 11 million and 12
million people, 6 million of
them Jews.
In the end, the Holocaust is still an
incomprehensible event and no amount of data
can convey its overarching emotional impact.
We are indebted to partners like The Florida
Orchestra, who open artistic portals for audiences
to learn and reflect in new ways. Throughout the
last centuries, music has stirred hope and change
and provided a vehicle for expressions of protest
against injustice.
Michael Tippett’s powerful musical response
to the terrible acts of Kristallnacht provides
both. Many people of the time, while personally
troubled by the actions of the Nazis, chose to be
bystanders, saying and doing nothing. One of the
core lessons of the Holocaust is that if we do not
respond when we see acts of injustice and hatred,
we are empowering the perpetrator and are
complicit ourselves in the act. Tippett chose to
be an “upstander,” providing an example of how
great artists respond to societal and moral issues
of their time.
Many thanks to The Florida Orchestra, true
“upstanders” in our community, for giving us a
new opportunity to remember and reflect during
this 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.