Harry T. Cook

11/07/08

Exactly 70 years ago Sunday, Nov. 9, 1938, those who hadn’t noticed or bothered to notice were confronted with prima facie evidence of the Nazi persecution of Jews.

That horror was given the unforgettable name “Kristillnacht,” or Night of Broken Glass, to account for the destruction of shops and offices owned and run by Jews all over Germany, the smashed windows, the summary execution of 92 Jews inside of six hours, the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of nearly 30,000 and maybe more.

The pogrom was billed as just deserts for Jews, one of whom had shot and wounded a German diplomat in the embassy in Paris. Seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan was outraged at his family’s unwarranted expulsion from Germany. That incident became the “justification” for a long-planned Nazi attack on Jews.

In an eight-hour period all across the Third Reich, more than 200 synagogues were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes were ransacked. Kristillnacht marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of a people who traced their lineage in Germany back nearly 2,000 years. Kristillnacht was the beginning of the Holocaust.

“Why? Why?” has been the question down through the decades. What was it about the Jews that made first Hitler and then his willing accomplices hate them so much? Answer: They were “different.” A Jew was “not one of us.” He was “the other,” allegedly of an alien religion, a ready-made enemy for the use and abuse by demagogues.

One hates to admit it, but the American people heard some of that kind of talk during the recent presidential campaign, as the man who is now our president-elect was said to be “not one of us,” and of whom it was said that he should be “taken out” and even, during one political rally, killed.

“Kill him,” screamed one fanatic, whose verbal savagery was cheered by others in that crowd and never as sternly or definitely rebuked as should have been done. The announced intent to kill another is a crime, though evidently it was not so deemed that day in Florida, and it was not that night in Germany when the harassing, the robbing, the torturing, the deporting and the killing of Jews were done with impunity.

Well, America, well, world: We are within 73 days of hailing as the 44th president of the United States a man who not so long ago was denounced as “not one of us”; one who was routinely depicted as an outsider; a consort, even, of terrorists and an inexperienced elitist for whom many said they could not vote merely because of his Negroid features.

At noon on Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama will become the president of all of us, and as much “one of us” as any American: the son of a Muslim from Kenya and of a white American woman. He lived in Hawaii, Kansas and Indonesia, went to school in California, New York and Cambridge, Mass., and was elected four years ago by the people of Illinois to serve them in the United States Senate. He is now the public face of America itself, the majority of whose voters did not buy the canard that he was not one of them.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless other great Americans who helped their country get to this day would be weeping in joy to see that we have finally overcome. We have overcome. Not some day, but today: this day on which, at least in this country, there are no homes and businesses being wantonly destroyed by the fevered minions of a despot and on which there are no long trains of cattle cars clanking down the tracks to systematic lynchings. If Dr. King were here, we would surely hear him say once again, “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

He would mean that America, by electing a mixed race, black-skinned man to the presidency, had freed itself from the bonds of its own slavery to prejudice and ignorance, and said with votes enough to matter that such language as “he is not one of us” has gone out along with the “N” word.

“Lift ev’ry voice and sing till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies; let it resound loud as the rolling sea. “Sing a song of the faith that the dark past has taught us; Sing a song of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.”

James Weldon Johnson, author of those words, died in 1938, 16 years before the United States Supreme Court declared in Brown vs. Board of Education that black children could not be condemned to separate and unequal public schools in this land of the free and the home of the brave, and 17 years before Rosa Parks declined to move to the back of the bus.

If Mr. Johnson were here today among us, I’m sure he would alter that line to read: “Let us give thanks ’cause our victory is won.” He would not mean victory of black over white, though one could be excused for thinking that. Mr. Johnson would mean that Americans, black and white alike, had finally won the victory over themselves in a war that has been going on since the first chained African stumbled onto these shores from a slave trader’s ship.

This day has been long in coming but definitely worth waiting for.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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