70th anniversary of Kristallnacht

More than a hundred people gathered for the last time in the Student Union Building at Queensborough Community College recently, to observe the 70th anniversary of a Nazi-fomented night of vandalism, arson and murder throughout Germany in 1938 that has come to be known as Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass.”
Moderator Arthur Flug, executive director of the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives at the College welcomed the audience, several of whom were survivors of the rampage which history marks as the beginning of the Nazi’s Holocaust - the attempt to exterminate Jews as a race in Europe.
Representing Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, Deputy Borough President Karen Koslowitz conveyed Marshall’s congratulations to the College administration and the evening’s honorees, Linda Spiegel of the Margaret Tietz Center for Nursing Care and Victoria Schneps-Yunis, publisher of The Courier chain of newspapers.
They would receive certificates of appreciation from the Borough President and citations from the State Assembly, presented by Assemblymembers Mark Weprin and Rory Lancman.
Spiegel was honored both for her work and the extraordinary service of the Tietz center, the former Kew Gardens Nursing Home, which began as a facility for Holocaust survivors and is now a premier facility for the elderly in Queens.
Schneps-Yunis was honored in part for publishing an extensive five-part series on the Holocaust in The Courier, with additional video coverage on the newspaper’s award-winning website, qns.com.
She began her career of activism by helping to expose “an atrocity” at a “facility for retarded children” known as the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island.
The expose launched the career of a then-budding journalist, Geraldo Rivera, and impelled Schneps-Yunis into publishing, “because we had such a hard time getting the word out,” Schneps-Yunis remarked.
“Whenever you see an atrocity, you have to do something about it,” she said, before calling the reporters who created the series, Jessica Lyons and video-journalist Noah Rosenberg, who expressed honor at the opportunity to produce the series.
Schneps Communications, the parent corporation of The Courier, is working with the Kupferberg Center to expand the series into a book, to be made available to schools nationwide as a teaching tool.
During her remarks, Koslowitz added her testimony of family members’ revelations of the atrocities perpetrated on their people - the imprisonments and abuse, and the disappearance of her own grandfather into the concentration camps.
Eduardo Marti, president of the school, located on the rolling campus of a former golf course at 223rd Street and 56th Avenue in Bayside, explained that the evening’s remembrance, on Monday, November 10, was the last at the student center only because a new home for the Kupferberg Center would soon be opened.
“We’re not a museum and we’re not a research center - we’re a laboratory,” Marti declared, saying that the hard work and education within would “enable us to survive.”
Marti observed that anyone entering the campus would be able to see the concrete-capped structure with glass walls, half clear, half crackled, symbolizing both clear inquiry and destructive barbarism, perched on the high ground. “The learning process will already have begun,” he declared.
Renowned Cantor Moti Fuchs sang songs recalling tenderness and grief, sadness and determination, including one written about Kristallnacht “Es Brennt” (It Burns) whose author was executed four years later.
Holocaust survivors Erich and Claire Heyman related their memories of that night and the years that followed. She spoke first in a matter-of-fact tone that made the revelations even more shocking.
Erich began with an apology because he had an easier time than his wife, who at 15 years old was chased from her home by S.S. storm troopers, barely escaped rape and spent more than two-and-a-half years in a slave labor camp and two years at Auschwitz.
He produced a smoke stained talis (prayer shawl) that he rescued from a burning synagogue in Cologne, Germany and revealed that after being forced to help clean up the broken glass, went home to find a draft notice conscripting him into the German Army.
Heyman then held up a faded green certificate - his notice of disqualification for military service - on the grounds that he was a Jew.
After closing remarks by Flug, during which he paid tribute to Charles Anolik, a Holocaust survivor and witness who became a patron and friend before recently passing away, he called back Cantor Fuchs to sing Eyl Malay Rachamem, a prayer for the dead.
After observing that in a public performance, it was unusual to don a prayer shawl, he asked Erich Heyman for the privilege of wearing the talis he had rescued 70 years before - “Given the situation.”
Thus garbed, Cantor Fuchs sang the prayer for those who perished in the streets and the camps, in a clear tenor voice, that emotion caused to crack, as he sang of the night of broken glass.