If one were constructing a time-line of events which
profoundly changed the course of human history, the night of November 9-10,
1938 would be engraved thereon in bold letters. Known afterward by the German
term Kristallnacht or more
graphically as The Night of Broken Glass,
it was actually the unleashing of the world’s most infamous act of mass
genocide.
Ever since the day Adolph Hitler
managed to assume power over Germany in 1933, his propaganda machine had been
“at war” against certain racial, religious and ethnic groups being painted as
“enemies of The State.” Prominent among these were the Jews of Europe, many of
whom had already and systematically been shorn of citizenship, barred from
office and deprived of business and home ownership rights throughout Germany
and Austria. With the dispatch of Nazi thugs on errands of destruction on
November 9th, 1938 based on trumped up and spurious news reports,
the opening campaign of what the world would come to know as the holocaust was underway in earnest. That
night, 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed or damaged, 1,000 synagogues
burned, and more than 30,000 people arrested and incarcerated.
The most tragic and chilling
understory to all of this was the massive silence
on the part of Germany’s populous, and good people everywhere who saw what was
happening but did or said nothing. Even more disillusioning was the fact that
even as the targeted citizens heeded Hitler’s encouragement to leave the
country of their birth – the same country many of them had fought for with
honor in WWI – neighboring countries, already dealing with large numbers of
refugees, began to close down their borders.
Alex Goldschmidt of Oldenburg, one
of those decorated war veterans, and a prominent businessman found himself
bereft of all his properties and goods, no longer welcome among long-time
friends and neighbors, and stranded together with his son Helmut in a land he
no longer recognized; a land where the only remaining destination would be a concentration
camp into which so many had already “disappeared.” After being denied
permission to enter not only any other European country, but even the
formerly-welcoming United States of America, an answer seemed to appear as the
country of Cuba agreed to accept an allotment of émigrés whose passage on a
ship of the world-famous Hamburg-America Line had been arranged by an international
group. Together with 900 others, the Goldschmidts finally found themselves
aboard the S.S. St. Louis en route to
freedom and a new life in early May, 1939.
Even as the St. Louis prepared to dock in Havana, fate was in the process of
intervening once again. Under extreme pressure from Spain’s fascist leader and
Hitler ally Francisco Franco, the Cuban government revoked its welcome and
refused entry to the escapees, despite the heroic pleadings of the ship’s kind
and caring skipper, Captain Gustav Shroeder. Although efforts on the part of
the international Jewish organizations did everything they could to bring a
solution, the passengers of the St. Louis
remained people without a country while the Hamburg-American liner was running
out of food, fuel and options. But what about the U.S.A., a country that had
opened its arms to “the tired and the poor” from around the world?
It was an election year in America,
and President Franklin Roosevelt – trying for an unprecedented third term –
needed the support of his own Democrat Party, in control of both houses of
Congress but unfriendly to the idea of an avalanche of Jewish immigrants after
setting a firm annual limit. Finally, the coalition of Jewish relief
organizations found what seemed a solution, when France, Belgium and England
agreed to share a division of the 900 despairing St. Louis voyagers.
Unfortunately for Alex and Helmut
Goldschmidt, they were among the 224 refugees sent to France, where a future
which at first seemed so bright ended with imprisonment at a series of work
camps soon administered by the Nazi “puppet” regime of Henri-Philippe Pétain,
and an eventual train ride to the ovens of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau
death camp. Along with more than six million others of their heritage, they
became a part of history’s blackest time-line. The story of their fateful
journey is well-told in the 2014 book “Alex’s
Wake” by Martin Goldsmith, Alex’s grandson and Helmut’s nephew. As I
traveled on that sad journey through the pages of Goldsmith’s odyssey, I was
reminded of an ancient prophecy found in the 28th chapter of
Deuteronomy which ends with the words. . .”ye
shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen and no man shall buy
you”.
Also ringing in my ears are the
words of Edmund Burke: “All that is
necessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”
The Hamburg-American liner M.S. St. Louis photographed in its home
harbor during days of peace.
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