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Thursday, November 8, 2007
7:30 p.m.
Charles Larracey Auditorium
Keene Middle School
Keynote speaker: Congressman/Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos (D-CA)
During the night of November 9-10, 1938, a massive pogrom (state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence) was orchestrated by the Nazi (National Socialist) government throughout Germany and the recently annexed state of Austria. A total of 815 shops, 29 department stores, 171 residences, and 267 synagogues were burned or otherwise destroyed. Ninety-one Jews were killed. The shattered panes of beveled glass that littered sidewalks, most of it coming from the shop windows of Jewish stores, gave the pogrom its name: Kristallnacht or "Night of Broken Glass." In the days that followed, 25-30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to Germany's concentration camps.
Kristallnacht marked the Nazis' first centrally organized operation of large-scale, anti-Jewish violence. It also signaled the fateful transfer of responsibility for "solving" the "Jewish Question" to the SS. It served as a prelude to the coming Holocaust.
The Remembrance
The Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies has chosen to focus on this event as an annual community-wide commemoration. The Remembrance brings the entire Keene community together in a remarkable way and enables participants to actively reflect upon the lessons of the Holocaust. Community leaders, educators, visiting scholars, and area schools participate in this solemn occasion. The Remembrance is coordinated by Keene State College, Keene High School, Keene Middle School, the Keene Interfaith Clergy Association, as well as community institutions such as city government, police, and fire.
Sponsors include the Keene Interfaith Clergy Association; KSC Campus Ministry, Congregation Ahavas Achim, and the Office of the Vice President for Finance and Planning at Keene State College.
The Remembrance is held in the heart of the community in downtown Keene and is free to the public. It allows greater accessibility and roots the event as a community experience. Church bells toll across the city as single remembrance candles are displayed in storefronts.
Though commemorative, the goal is to encourage awareness, community service, and human rights activism. Keynote speakers have included Gerhard Weinberg, the 2001 Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Marion Pritchard, Dutch Rescuer and Yad Vashem recognized "Righteous Among the Nations," Warren Priest, Liberator of Dachau and Buchenwald and founder of the "Buchenwald and Beyond Foundation," and Sibylle Niemoeller von Sell, widow of Pastor Martin Niemoeller.
The event illustrates how the Center confronts contemporary issues of genocide, injustice, and bigotry through the memory of the Holocaust and has served as a model for other communities wishing to commemorate these events. It also acts as an example of how the Center brings eyewitness testimony to the people of New Hampshire.
We end with the statement "Always ready to help," or, in French, "Toujours prêt à servir" as a reminder of the Righteous in Le Chambon sur Lignon and other villages in the Haute-Loire region of France who during the darkness of the Shoah showed the courage and necessity to care.
We do this in order to awaken in human beings the need to recognize the preciousness of life and its value to all of us. We do this to fulfill the mission of the Cohen Center to teach the facts and lessons of the Holocaust in order to motivate successive generations to recognize an ethical responsibility to respond to prejudice and hatred.
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2007 Kristallnacht
Remembrance Speaker: Congressman Thomas Lantos (CA)
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1928, Lantos escaped from an Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascists) labor camp and survived the Nazi occupation of his country by hiding in a Budapest safe house set up by the Swedish rescuer, Raoul Wallenberg. His story is one of the individual accounts that form the basis of Steven Spielberg's Academy Award winning documentary, The Last Days, about the Holocaust in Hungary.
"I would like to tell you what an incredibly good day it was for me to be among you and to share with you in your labors as teachers of the Holocaust. The warmth with which you received me, the attentiveness with which you listened to me and responded, the challenge and affirmation you gave me and, above all perhaps, the renewed energy and confidence you instilled in me – all this and more makes me profoundly grateful to you. I now have you all as companions, indeed, I would say: guardian angels, on my way. I shall remember my time with you for long and hold you in my thoughts. Let me assure you that I accompany you all on your journey in this important commitment you and I share together. I wish you my best and hope that our paths may cross again, and I may meet the four of you, who were present not 'in the flesh' but certainly 'in spirit.'"– Dr. Martin Rumscheidt
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