Kristallnacht - Prelude to Disaster - Martin Gilbert

 

Though people have heard of the Holocaust and atrocities against the Jewish people in the 2 World War, and they have heard of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka etc not many people will know or understand what happened and the consequences prior to the holocaust happening and the suffering of the Jewish people in Germany and Austria.

In Kristallnacht, the author Martin Gilbert draws on personal correspondence with over 50 eyewitnesses and on vivid newspaper and diplomatic reports to produce a meticulously researched and utterly compelling account of a night that set the tone of the atrocities suffered by Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis.

For those that do not know, Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass – saw the destruction in a single night of more than a thousand synagogues, the ransacking of tens of 1000s of Jewish shops and homes, and more than 30,000 Jewish men rounded up and taken to concentration camps.  It started the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister warning of the Holocaust to follow.

Warning this is a hard book to read. If you have any sort of compassion and caring this book will eat at you.  Yes, it is history and, in the past, but 80+ years later these atrocities continue to haunt the world.    It will make you think, weep, be aghast at the inhumanity that man can cause man.   The despair at what happened and the shear brutality that was brought down on the Jewish communities right cross Germany and Austria.

The first-hand accounts of witnesses, of young children being separated from their families never to see them again, the reporting from journalists at the time and the reports of diplomats across the world and the work they did to try and help people escape the torture and concentration camps brings forward the stark reality of what happened.

Story after story, chapter after chapter the book drives home the terror that must have been felt by these families as the prelude to Kristallnacht developed, what happened on the night itself and the consequences.  

This book is a must read for everyone.  It gives you an understanding of the why and the what, of the family stories and the consequences.   Do not expect and easy read it is not.  It is heart wrenching; it makes you think, and it gives to a picture of the terror that must have been felt and a picture of what it must have been like.

A hard but necessary book to read on the atrocities brought down on the Jewish people.