(Jewish Group) On Kristallnacht, the world ignored Jewish suffering. Today, we risk repeating (it)
On Kristallnacht, the world ignored Jewish suffering. Today, we risk repeating this mistake
On the way to school, 10-year-old Ruth Winkelmann saw Nazi stormtroopers painting a Star of David onto the back of a religious Jews coat.
In an interview with the BBC, Ruth said: I thought, My dad is with me and nothing bad can happen to me, but it was a very disturbing sight, and I was shaking.
It was November 10, 1938, the second day of Kristallnacht, a pogrom on local Jews launched by the Nazi Sturmabteilung paramilitary force together with German civilians throughout Nazi Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland.
On Kristallnacht, the world ignored Jewish suffering. Today, we risk repeating this mistake by the Forward
As her father, who worked in his parents scrap-metal business, drove her to school, Ruth saw broken shop windows and shards of glass lying in the streets, as well as a shop where someone had painted the word Jew, and smeared on a Star of David.
Ruth went to a Jewish school: upon arrival, the head teacher told the pupils what had been happening elsewhere in the city during the pogrom. Jewish shops had been smashed up and people brutally killed. Shop windows had been broken everywhere, and the words Jew or Jewish pig written in many places, Ruth recalled. Several of her friends fathers were among thousands deported or sent to concentration camps.
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