Tea at Trianon: Remembering Kristallnacht

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Remembering Kristallnacht

Only seventy-five years ago. From Haaretz:

“I still don’t know if that night was either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. But it clearly marked a turning point”, says the now 81-year-old Dr. Menachem Mayer. He and his family had led an ordinary life in the village of Hoffenheim, in Southwestern Germany – a life that suddenly ended in the early hours of November 10, 1938. It was well before dawn when German forces broke into the Mayers' home, pulled six-year-old Menachem, his parents and his brother Manfred, 9, out of their second-floor apartment, threw their belongings into the street and burned the nearby synagogue.
The nationwide pogrom has made history as "The Night of the Broken Glass", or “Kristallnacht” in German. It was exactly 75 years ago that Nazi storm troopers murdered hundreds of German Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues and Jewish shops

“I still remember standing on the street, only wearing pajamas and watching those Nazi SA (Assault Division) thugs wrecking our life”, says Dr. Mayer as if no time had passed since then. “I may have forgotten many things - but this image was burned into my memory since 75 years. It was the end of my childhood.”

At the end of 1940, the two young brothers and their parents were deported to France and held in a detention camp there. In 1942, the parents were then sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered. Heinz was smuggled into Switzerland under a false name, and Manfred was hidden in France until the liberation. The brothers survived. Manfred made his way to the United States while Menachem immigrated to Israel in 1948, installed himself in Jerusalem and became a science teaching superintendent. (Read more.)