Hillel remembers Kristallnacht

The image of a cathedral reflected onto the television screen, which was playing a video… The image of a cathedral reflected onto the television screen, which was playing a video outlining the destruction of the religious buildings of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

The video, which detailed Kristallnacht, played Monday outside of the William Pitt Union, where onlookers could see the image of the Cathedral of Learning reflecting onto the screen from across Bigelow Boulevard.

On Kristallnacht, which translates to “The Night of Broken Glass,” the windows were smashed and the merchandise destroyed in Jewish shops and department stores within Nazi-controlled Europe. On the same night, Nov. 9, 1938, and into the next day, 267 synagogues were burned and 91 Jews were killed, according to a history packet provided by members of Hillel, an international organization for Jewish students.

Kristallnacht occurred after Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew, murdered a member of the German Embassy staff in Paris, according to the same history packet.

Hillel will host a week full of events dedicated to the remembrance of Kristallnacht. The week began with a glass-breaking on the patio of the William Pitt Union on Monday afternoon, and will end with a trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. on Sunday.

The members of Hillel were not actually permitted to break glass in front of onlookers, so they instead made a display of the broken glass and glued glass shards to posters describing Kristallnacht.

Lindsay Waldman, a senior at Pitt, helped to organize this event, which was designed to remember and raise awareness about Kristallnacht.

“It was the beginning of recognition throughout the world that there was something very wrong going on in Germany,” she said, explaining why it is important for people to know about the history of Kristallnacht.

Later that night, at the Hillel Jewish University Center on Forbes Avenue, Fritz Ottenheimer, a Jewish man who lived in Konstanz, Germany when Kristallnacht occurred, spoke to students from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, as well as community members.

“On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938, I was awoken by a loud explosion,” Ottenheimer said. “So I ran downstairs and outside and saw that, where normally our beautiful synagogue was, now stood a wall of flames.”

Ottenheimer later learned that a Schutzstaffel, or SS, demolition team had blown up the synagogue. Unlike most other German towns with a Jewish population, there were no broken store windows in Konstanz, he added.

Later that day, members of the Gestapo arrested Ottenheimer’s father, as well as 30,000 other Jewish men throughout Germany. They took him to Dachau, a concentration camp, where there were 30,000 prison uniforms waiting for use.

Ottenheimer made it clear that, at this time in history, the father was a very important figure in within the family.

“When you take the father away from the family, it is like decapitating someone,” he said.

Ottenheimer’s father was one of the lucky men who survived the concentration camp and was permitted to return home in late December. All of the men who survived were released within one to six months after their arrests.

Ottenheimer believes that the purpose of arresting so many Jews was “to scare people into leaving Germany.”

“Hitler’s early goal was not to kill the Jews, but to drive them out of Germany,” he said.

After years of trying to emigrate from Germany, the family was finally able to leave in May 1939 – at the age of 14, Ottenheimer and his parents moved to the United States to join his sister. During World War II and the years preceding it, immigration quotas made it very hard for German Jews to move into the United States, he said. For this reason, there was an intense process of reviews on sponsorships for anyone who wanted to immigrate.

After getting through college, Ottenheimer joined the U.S. Army.

“I was privileged enough to take part in the final drive across Germany,” he said. “As my father fought for his fatherland and earned honors, I was an American soldier fighting against my fatherland in World War II.”

As a result of Kristallnacht, and then the Holocaust, Ottenheimer has experienced a change in his beliefs in God.

“It changed my understanding of God and how He works,” he said. “Now I see God more as a miraculous creator, but when things get tough, I still find myself asking God for help.”

To help those in the audience who could not comprehend the loss that Jews felt during and after World War II, Ottenheimer likened the period to Sept. 11, 2001. On this day, 3,000 people were killed. Throughout the Holocaust, which lasted about 2,000 days, six million Jews were killed.

This means that about 3,000 Jewish people were killed each day.

“Everyday, for 2,000 days, there was that kind of disaster, and it was all caused by hatred,” he said.