Havana, Wednesday, November 11, 2009, Year 13, Number 316 Behind the news The night of broken glass (Kristallnacht) A CubaNews translation by Will Reissner. Edited by Walter Lippmann. Under a persistent drizzle and a whole neon media show, on November 9 Germans celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as the historic date that changed the political life of that country, until then divided into two nations, the former socialist German Democratic Republic, and the German Federal Republic, allied with NATO and the United States. Various news media will recall that for the Jews of the whole world the November 9 date brings back other very different memories. That was a tragic date, when in the German capital some 71 years ago Adolf Hitler's Nazi hordes carried out a horrendous hunt of human beings, acting like bloodthirsty beasts in pursuing the defenseless Berlin Jews on what is known in contemporary history as "the Night of the Broken Glass." On that sad occasion, some 91 Jews were reported dead, their synagogues destroyed, and their businesses demolished, thereby initiating the most heinous campaign of hatred unleashed in the twentieth century against a human group because of their race. The http://www.vho.org/aaargh/espa/noche.html website describes this horrendous event, the so-called night of broken glass (Kristallnacht in German) as one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of Germany and the starting or departure point for the Final Solution, which is always associated with the Holocaust that ended in the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi government according to http://www.segunda-guerra-mundial.com/2gm-holocausto-judio.html . Western nations like Great Britain, France, the United States, and Germany itself, which sometimes forgets its historic memory, jubilantly celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they forget or find it inconvenient to speak about that other November 9, the "Night of the Broken Glass," thereby maintaining a complicit silence so as not to recall that tragedy. And that is how, with the supposed glories, the sad memories are buried. (Juan Diego Nusa Peñalver). http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2009/11/11/interna/artic07.html |
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