Kristallnacht
Nazis in Germany started the Jewish pogrom. They set fire to the synagogue, shattering glass at Jewish shops. Kristallnacht bears his name by broken glass from shop windows, but also because it should have symbolized the ‘purge’ – crystallization – the Aryan race from the Jews. It took place in the night of the 9th to 10 November 1938. A day later also in the Czech-German borderlands – Sudetenland. Local Nazis, however, refused to burn synagogues, and so there were sent special units of the SS from Plauen. “The mood among the inhabitants of Eger was very despondent. Nobody didn´t rejoice. Nobody but also dared to publicly protest against it, “says Edith Bergler, a former high school teacher of Bayreuth high school in her book, for which she collected material between the former German residents of the Karlovy Vary Region.“Around firefighters stood ready with water. They were not allowed to extinguish. Just to see that the fire has not spread to other houses. “
Shoah / Holocaust
The systematic name for a state-run persecution and mass murders of marked individuals (in the case of the 2nd World War, it was the Jews). The Holocaust was a Nazi practical application of a coded phrase “the final solution of the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage).
Photo: David Friedmann and picture painted by himself (C D. Friedmann Collection. More about DF here…)