Remembrance

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of "Kristallnacht," the 1938 night of pogroms (coordinated vandalism, arson, killing and abduction) committed against Jewish Germans and their homes, businesses and synagogues.

I know there were a number of events around Berlin in commemoration yesterday, for example a program of guided tours through specific neighborhoods, stopping at all the "Stolpersteine" ("stumbling stones"), tiny memorial plaques set into the sidewalks in front of buildings, bearing the names of Jewish individuals who lived there and then were deported and killed. There are a lot of these plaques around Berlin. Some of these tours were led by historians; many involved cleaning the plaques, with a suggestion that participants also bring roses to lay in remembrance.

Personally, attending an event of this sort didn't draw me. I guess I didn't feel like spending my day in an act of concerted group mourning with a bunch of contrite Germans? Don't get me wrong, I think it's very important that people do these things, and good that there are enough people in Germany who still care, even as this history slips into a past beyond the memory of most people still living. I guess I just prefer to mourn on my own time, and more privately.

Even just reading the event descriptions, though, gave me a very strange feeling. One tour started at Zionskirchplatz (location of one of my favorite cafés, so I pass through there often), then worked its way along the sites of former Jewish businesses on Brunnenstrasse (a street I used to walk along all the time, when I lived in the area).

You'd think I'd be used to this by now, but it's almost impossible to fathom that these streets I know today are those same streets. The streets with the former Jewish businesses, and the pogroms.

And walking through the neighborhood today, I found myself surprisingly moved to see roses laid at many of the Stolpersteine I passed. The plaques are so tiny, you have to bend down if you want to read the names on them, and they mostly get passed by, as simply part of the fabric of the city. It's good to see people paying attention.

Perhaps here is the best place to end this train of thought: As I'm writing this, I (an American Jew) am eating a bagel I bought from Shakespeare and Sons, the bookshop-and-café run by a Jewish American woman and her Czech husband. I'd dropped by there to ask if they're going to be hosting a Chanukah party again this year, and they said yes. And that's not even mentioning the synagogue and Jewish school down the street from my office, or the Jewish bakery around the corner from my apartment, or the yeshiva (religious educational institution) now located on that very same Brunnenstrasse.

So what I choose to take away from all these thoughts is that, 75 years after the Nazis tried to destroy it, Jewish culture is again flourishing in Berlin.