Statement made on 25 November 2008 by Senator Yoine Goldstein (retired)
Hon. Yoine Goldstein:
Honourable senators, the nights of November 9 to November 10, 2008, marked the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a massive coordinated attack on Jews throughout Germany. November 9 was chosen by the Nazis with purpose; it marked the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, a holy day in the Nazi calendar.
This planned massive attack against the Jews in Germany signalled the institutional beginnings of what was to become the Holocaust. That it was carefully planned, scripted and executed appears from the following orders given to all Gestapo and SD district and sub-district offices that night by Reinhard Heydrich. It was headed:
Concerning: measures against Jews in the present night.
The relevant part of it reads as follows:
. . . the political leadership is to be informed that the German police have received the following instructions from the Reichsführer SS and Chief of Police, to which the measures of the political leadership should be adapted, appropriately:
(a) Only such measures shall be taken as will not endanger German life or property, (i.e. synagogue burning only if there is no fire-danger to the surroundings).
(b) Businesses and dwellings of Jews should only be destroyed, not plundered. The police are instructed to supervise this regulation and to arrest looters.
(c) Special care is to be taken that in business streets non-Jewish businesses are absolutely secured against damage.
The Night of Broken Glass, honourable senators, stands as a metaphor for the dictum by Edmund Burke that all it takes for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to do nothing.
Good people did nothing.
In one ugly, horrific night, 267 synagogues were destroyed, some 7,500 stores were ransacked, 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps where virtually all of them were murdered and 91 Jews were killed on the spot.
The fact that the world stood by silently while this atrocity was taking place encouraged the Nazis to go further, as indeed they did.
A good friend of mine in this chamber asked me some time ago, when I made a statement about the Holocaust, why I and other Jews continue to live in the Holocaust. My response was that I and other Jews do not live in the Holocaust but the Holocaust continues to live in us.
I feel compelled, therefore, to raise my voice and to commemorate events like Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, not so much because they occurred or because they are permanent stains which remain on the fabric of humanity, but to draw attention to the fact that genocide, the denial of human rights both yesterday and today and the deprivation of basic needs continue to happen each and every day. They happen far away, in places like Africa, in countries whose names we cannot pronounce, and much closer to home, to human beings who talk, breathe and feel just as we do.
Honourable senators, as parliamentarians, we use our offices to draw the attention of the public to these atrocities. Perhaps we can do no more than that, but certainly we can do no less.