PLEASANTVILLE, N.J. — It is November and my thoughts turn back to six months ago, another time and another place. I was in Germany escorting a group of college students to see the Holocaust sites.
“So this is where is all started,” said one of the guys. He looked up and down the streets, the well-paved roads, the litter-free avenues.
I nodded my head, understanding what had not been voiced.
We looked at the building, the houses with the manicured lawns, the clean driveways, walls free of graffiti. Everything was so pleasant, so civilized, and all I could answer was, “Here. Right here.”
We had already seen the Munich Beer Hall where Hitler had jumped up on a table and proclaimed himself the Führer, and where he had been arrested, but then after a short time, had been released.
We saw where thousands of people had assembled and raised their hands in salute, where children sang songs proclaiming their allegiance and where this same butchery had verbally embraced them, calling the young people, “My Youth.” At the time, everyone had cheered, cheered and marched to the sound of music and lights, a choreography of sound and color and music.
We continued walking down the tree-lined streets as I pointed out different places. “Here is where this used to be. This was destroyed. Here was the place where…”
And we read little plaques telling us where a synagogue used to stand, where a house of worship was razed to the ground. It was then that one student asked me to explain what a small sign indicated. It was in German and she could not decipher the words. Now, my German is not too fluent so I turned to my colleague who had specialized in German language and history, and whose family had come from Germany, and I asked for an explanation. He had no problem in translating and then explaining, “This sign indicates that there is a place close by where dogs can drink from special water fountains to slake their thirst.”
How nice! How civilized! How sensitive! Animals get thirsty and water is provided for them. We thought of the cattle cars where human being were huddled together with ho place to breathe free, where there was no water given to relieve their thirst. Where the heat had become so unbearable that babies cried out for water and there was none. Where some of these men and women were forced to drink their own urine because their mouths were so parched. And where others escaped the enormity of this cruelty by exiting from life. But these same perpetrators, these same captors, provided water fountains for dogs.
And wasn’t it Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s henchman and advisers, who in this very month, but in the year 1938, stated that “I would rather that you slaughtered 200 Jews than destroy one piece of Aryan property.” And this same Goering who told Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, on Nov. 12 of that same year that if Jews want to visit parks, put animals that look like Jews in those parks. And yet that same Goering used to walk on tiptoe into his home at night because he didn’t want to disturb his sleeping canary. How humane! How considerate!
So how could I restrain myself from pointing all this out to these young people who were trying to understand that which was still beyond my own comprehension. Here it had all begun, in the very heart of Christian Europe, in the center of European culture, where Goethe wrote and Schiller sang, where the sensitive men and women, the Aryan Volk, did not want their animals to go thirsty, so that they had to provide water places for their dogs. And that although hundreds of Jewish synagogues no longer stand and are remembered only by a small plaque, these water fountains and these German signs still remain.
So it is November now, six months later, and we will pause for a few minutes to remember Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when houses of worship were burned and looted and ransacked. We will assemble and offer our prayers and listen to speakers tell of the enormity of this tragedy and I shall remember a water fountain for dogs.