November 9 is the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On this date in 1938, German Jews suffered a massive, state-sponsored pogrom. Synagogues were desecrated. Jewish-owned businesses and homes destroyed. Many Jews were beaten senselessly and killed. And on October 7, the world witnessed another orchestrated attack targeting Israeli civilians. Unprovoked, Hamas slaughtered defenseless women and their infants, the elderly, and young people in celebration of, ironically, peace.
In 1988, I visited a Jewish cemetery that had been desecrated on Kristallnacht, situated in the former eastern sector of Berlin. We were a Fulbright family, my husband awarded a teaching position at Humboldt University. The three of us visited the old cemetery on a blustery February day and were the sole visitors aside from the few Jewish volunteers preparing the grounds for the return of spring. Century-old trees were dormant still. Workers pruned branches from the barren trees. Shrubs were shaped, dead growth cut away. Except for the sound of a biting wind, there was silence behind the cemetery walls.
The graves, though, the groundskeepers left untouched. Toppled, broken headstones, some unrecognizable, were left just as they had been found the morning after Kristallnacht 50 years earlier.
We wandered gingerly — Frank, me, 10-year-old Eric — each lost in our own thoughts about what we saw before us, a desecration of the dead. I remember thinking, “I am in a time capsule,” bearing witness to the attempted erasure of the Jewish people from history itself.
That is why the war in Israel and Gaza right now is not about “two sides” with equivalent grievances. There is only the one side: a tiny speck of a country that has been fighting for the right to exist since the United Nations voted statehood for Israel in 1947, its anniversary in just a few weeks, too.
The other side? Achille Lauro. The 1972 Munich Olympics. The hijacking of planes during the 1987-88 Intifada. Lockerbie, Scotland. September 11. The Los Angeles Times’ reporting of targeted synagogues and yeshivas in the Fairfax district and other Southland Jewish enclaves. The weekend’s massive Palestinian protest in Washington, DC, included signs that read: “From the river to the sea.”
A few months later in early spring, my boy and I visited another Berlin cemetery, this one in picturesque Mahlsdorf, just outside Berlin. There we visited an old church (one that had survived the war), and then wandered through its cemetery. But unlike the Jewish cemetery, this graveyard was pristine, including the polished, upright headstones. That Sunday, the grounds were now lush green, entire families polishing headstones and pruning their gravesites’ rose bushes and geraniums.
One headstone beckoned to me. I saw engraved the image of a mother embracing her two young children. The date: February, 1945. The family must have been killed during the Allies’ incessant aerial bombing over Berlin in those last months of the war.
Were those pilots killers? Were the mother and her babies deserving of death? Should Eisenhower have issued a “pause”? Can there be a humane war, ever? At this moment, all I can be certain of is that Hamas attacked defenseless civilians and in a most brutal way, including the use of its own people as shields. Israel responded in order to defend her right to exist. I stand with Israel.