Wednesday

Yom Ha' Shoah with Dr. Ken Wald Speaking on

Revenge, Reconciliation and Responsibility

	In 1938, the Kristallnacht pogrom swept across a small German town in Saxony, targeting the textile shop of the town’s only Jewish family. Under the Nazi onslaught, Kurt and Regina Schoenwald fled their home of almost thirty years for the safety of Berlin. Less than four years later, they were deported to their deaths in Eastern Europe.
	Seventy years later, many Schoenwald descendants returned to Saxony to unveil a monument to Kurt and Regina. As part of a week-long program devoted to the Kristallnacht pogrom, Ken Wald, Kurt and Regina’s grandson, was invited to address the townspeople on behalf of the family.
	At Gainesville’s Holocaust Memorial Ceremony on Sunday, April 26th, Wald recounted his remarks to the citizens of Grossrohrsdorf. He spoke about the anger he carried against the German people, stoked by his father’s wish for revenge against those who killed his family. But he also spoke about how that prejudice was gradually blunted by the determined efforts of a small group of citizens to revive the memory of the Schoenwalds under difficult circumstances.
	Led by a Lutheran minister, who had learned about Judaism in an East Berlin seminary, these townspeople began collecting information and artifacts about the Schoenwalds. Interviewing many seniors who had known the family, they assembled a portrait of Grosrohrsdorf’s only Jewish family before and after the rise of Nazism.

Dr. Ken Wald

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Over the course of several visits,” he says, “the efforts by local residents to recover family history brought me to some degree of reconciliation with a heritage I had despised and denied.” The week ended with the unveiling of a memorial to Kurt and Regina, the first such official recognition in the town’s history. For Wald, the monument symbolizes the town’s willingness restore his grandparents to local history.

In his talk, Wald challenged the residents of Grosrohrsdorf to remember how they treated the Schoenwalds and apply the lessons to other “strangers.” He expected some resentment of his remarks but found very little. “We expected that the week would be emotionally difficult for us,” Wald observes, “but we were surprised how deeply it affected many of the Germans we met.” Unlike Germans in West Germany, where the Holocaust was openly discussed, Germans who lived under the Communist regime in the East had no such experience. As an East German city, Grosrohrsdorf was largely cut off from this awareness.

Wald is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He serves on the Commissioner of Education’s Task Force on Holocaust Education and co-founded the Summer Holocaust Institute for Florida’s Teacher at UF.

Each year, the Jewish Council of North Central Florida presents a program of Holocaust Remembrance. During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 11 million individuals. Many of the victims were political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma Gypsies, non-heterosexuals, and anyone who was mentally or physically handicapped. They were murdered because they did not meet the Nazi criteria of an acceptable human being. Out of the 11 million victims, six million were Jews (1.5 million of them children). They were exterminated because the Nazis considered them to be racially inferior. Sadly, genocide continues to be a problem around the world.

The Holocaust Memorial Program is a time when local Survivors and Liberators join with the community to remember lost family members as well as work to ensure that such atrocities will never happen again. The memorial program also serves as an education program and informs the public of the horror of the Nazi regime as well as urge young people to pursue a path of tolerance and not to remain silent when they encounter bigotry. This program is designed for both the Jewish and non-Jewish community and everyone is welcome to attend.


Schoenwald Store circa 1930's	Kurt and Regina Schoenwald	Steve (Ken's brother) & Ken	Schoenwald Store 2008
		Wald in front of Monument


	Audience for Wald Talk at Festival Hall	Sign from Schoenwald Store

	Below are Images of Kristallnacht also know as "Crystal night" or the Night of Broken Glass. Kristallnacht is consider by many historians and scholars of the Holocuast to be the beginning of the Nazi implementation of the final solution; the mass extermination of not only all the Jews in Europe, but of all those considered 'lesser' beings from the Nazi "master race" menatlity. It began as an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9–10, 1938. It is often called Novemberpogrom or Reichspogromnacht in German.
	The excuse that the Nazi's used for Kristallnacht is generally considered to be the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew. In response a coordinated attack on Jewish People and their property was perpetrated and 91 Jews were murdered. Another 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. More than 200 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. The calculated manor and organized methods of this destruction point to a well orchestrated plan rather than a general riot and thus it is clear that the excuse of the assassination of vom Rath was just a front for what was planned to take place with or without catalyzing event. Kristallnacht was in fact part of a broader Nazi policy of antisemitism and persecution of the Jews. Kristallnacht was followed by further economic and political persecutions and is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution.


Kristallnacht, example of physical damage to a store front.	A burning synagogue, Kristallnacht, November 9th, 1938	Burning synagogue, Kristallnacht, November 10th, 1938	Jews arrested during Kristallnacht line up for roll call at Buchenwald, 1938

A photo taken in October 2005 by Nathaniel Samson. The subject is a plaque on the front of the New Synagogue, Berlin, stating the interesting history of the building.

The plaque reads:

This synagogue is 100 years old
and was set ablaze on 9 November
1938 by the Nazis IN KRISTALLNACHT

During the Second World War 1939-1945
it was destroyed by 1943 bombing raids

The façade of this house of God shall
remain forever a site of remembrance

NEVER FORGET

The Jewish Community of Greater Berlin
The Directorate