Ongelezen in de kast

“In the night of 9 to 10 November 1938 throughout Germany Jewish synagogues and shops were rampaged and burnt down by German mobs. My grandparents did not live in Germany themselves but they had several relatives, one of whom was killed, after being brutally beaten and tramped by members of the SA, the military arm of Hitler’s party. Of course, I was too young to have experienced Kristallnacht as this night of barbarism was named, but every Jewish child was immersed with the fear that was handed down from generation to generation. I therefore have very vivid memories of Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass.

I have memories of a Jewish school being set aflame by seventeen and eighteen year old boys who tore the old Talmud teacher by his beard out of the building, before breaking the man’s back by repetitive and relentless kicking, while the elder comrades of the boys and SA Gruppenfuehrer stood aside laughing and inciting by his laughing the brown vested vandals and murderers to be. A fifth boy painted a white Star of David on the walls, before they disappeared in the night, leaving a dead man and disgrace.

This fear was vivid but it was a child’s fear nevertheless. This fear was no larger than the fear of Santa Claus that I inherited from my playmates in the street. In Amsterdam Santa Claus has Moorish assistants called Zwarte Piet who would put you in their jute bags to take you away to Spain if you have behaved badly during the year, and this legend aroused such fear of consciousness in me, that Zwarte Piet seemed to me endlessly more evil than the Nazi’s even though Zwarte Piet was a racist legend of a white-Christian society.