The Polish Aktion

While we’re still in November, I offer up one more fact.

Kristallnacht is the event that marks the beginning of the end. In the first weeks of November 1938, German Jews took a blow to the head: riots, imprisonment, beatings, and vandalism. While the name assigned to the eruption is now controversial, it references one of the signal images of the episode: broken glass on the sidewalks and in the streets. Shop windows were smashed and looted on November 9 by anti-Semitic officials and citizens. In the course of a nighttime orgy of violence, a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground. By morning, German Jewish life had moved across the threshold. It was no longer simply constrained or untenable, but a full-blown catastrophe a final destination.

But like most human disasters, it didn’t happen all at once. A few days before, a young Jew named Herschel Grynszpan assassinated a low-level German official in Paris. The nazis (lower case intentional) used the event as a pretext, claiming that Grynszpan was a conspirator, acting for an international cabal. To protect the Reich, Germany was “forced” to take action, bringing the wrath of the state down on German Jews. They had already been stripped of the rights of citizenship. What remained was violence against their property and their persons.

Of course, Herschel Grynszpan was no such actor. He was a displaced Polish Jew, with family in Germany that had just been deported by the German government. What Grynszpan knew thanks to a postcard from his sister, is that the Grynszpans had just been driven into Poland in October and deposited in a squalid, refugee internment camp where they remained for a year as stateless pariahs. Insufficient food was only part of it. They were exposed to the winter and crippling anxiety.

The point recently made by historian Timothy Snyder is that deeportation is at the root of what we now call Kristallnacht. The state rounded up vulnerable citizens who had been allowed to settle in Germany proper and were then unceremoniously dumped across the border. Germany banned them and so did Poland, which rebelled against the idea of a flood of despised Jews. Caught in the crosshairs of this legislative war were people like the Grynszpans who had nowhere to go. Germany eventually made the final decision. Virtually all of them ended up in the maw of Auschwitz.

As you have already sensed, the so-called Polenaktion (“Polish Aktion”) has a modern analogue. But instead of nazis at the helm, it has Stephen Miller, the heartless ideologue who operates with his conspirators in the White House and has discarded mercy and humanity at the side of the road. Nazis now come in brand new packages. This one had his bar mitzvah in Los Angeles and was confirmed at The Santa Monica Synagogue.