The crystal night or Kristallnacht. 82 years ago.

The crystal night or Kristallnacht.

November 9, 1938 will mark the history of Germany with a black stone.

A milestone that will lead to the massacre of the German Jewish minority, which will be called the Holocaust.

The name "Kristallnacht" sounds almost like the title of a fairy tale novel, but in fact we are very far from that.

What happened 82 years ago during that night?

What led to a mass massacre and the destruction of more than 267 places of worship, 7,500 store windows broken and looted, the death of 91 people and the deportation of nearly 30,000 German Jews to concentration camps, which have not yet become extermination camps?

At the origin of all this was a 17-year-old young man of Polish origin, Herschel Greenspan, who had settled in Paris and who, on November 7, 1938, murdered the number two of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst Vom Rath. This act, judged as terrorist by the Germans and the French authorities at the time, triggered, with the death of this diplomat, a pogrom that Germany had not known since the first crusades in 1095.

It will therefore be the German newspapers, inspired by Joseph Goebbels Minister of Propaganda, who will call this dark night, the "Night of Crystal" referring to the shards of glass on the floor of the damaged shop windows, which shone like crystal.

If I refer to this dark anniversary, it is in order to draw attention to the fact that today in France, in a rather nauseating atmosphere, four 10-year-old children of Turkish origin were taken into custody for 11 hours, on the grounds that they had allegedly committed an apology for terrorism, in the town of Albertville.

The question I ask myself is simple, how could police officers, potentially fathers of a family, carry out such a task against children, whose conscience is totally absent from the words they might have said?

What human being, is capable of dehumanizing to this point children who are not even pre-adolescents by putting them on the grill for questions whose meaning they do not even understand?

Evidently we are beginning to observe drifts, whose political character is not necessarily absent and whose international issues, as always, have an impact on national issues.

Be that as it may, November 9, 1938, cannot and must not make us forget that, regardless of the racist state that ruled Nazi Germany at the time, the rest of the world was cowardly silent about the unworthy behavior that an entire country had agreed to adopt, even though there the injustice was blatant.

But above all, we must not forget that the democracies that witnessed this event did not lift a finger, or even the slightest criticism or condemnation of pure form, in the face of this pogrom worthy of the savagery of the Middle Ages.

November 9 is a date that questions us all and that we must all look at in the light of our current history.

That is why I have decided to talk about it so as not to make myself a passive accomplice to what is happening today, by analogy.

Gamal Abina co-founder of the MDC (Civil Rights Movement.)

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)