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AMMUNITION!
This is so controversial that I almost didn’t publish it
I have a friend who is Jewish whose grandparents fled to this country in 1938 to escape the Nazis. This was right after Kristallnacht.
It seems odd that Kristallnacht, literally meaning “crystal night,” should be the name for the night the Nazi dictatorship began the systematic slaughter of Jews. The word sounds like the tinkling of a wine glass dropped on a tile floor by a tipsy party guest.
Schreienacht — “night of screams” — would better evoke the sound of more than 400 men, women, and children being brutally beaten and killed on that first night of the Jewish pogroms. Flammennacht — “night of blazes” — would create a clearer image of almost 9,000 homes, businesses, and synagogues burning to the ground while firefighters watched and did nothing.
In the weeks after that night, Hitler’s Gestapo arrested approximately 30,000 Jewish men and hauled them off to concentration camps.
We know the rest.
Ten years ago, my friend journeyed back to his ancestral home to see if he could find relatives his family had heard nothing about in all the years since that terrible time. He told me, sadly, that he could find no trace of his family or even of his family name. He said he even searched for headstones in…
